FAPESP Countdown: “The many faces of the sertão”

The Brazil Institute is counting down to this year’s FAPESP Week (November 17-21), organized in collaboration with the São Paulo Research Foundation (FAPESP), UC Berkeley, and UC Davis. The symposium aims at strengthening the links between scientists from Brazil and the U.S. with the objective of promoting research partnerships. Find out more about the 2014 FAPESP Week in California here. 

Rodrigo de Oliveiro Andrade – Pesquisa FAPESP, 2014 Print Edition, Published in July 2013

During an 1818 Austrian expedition to Brazil—a scientific investigation that brought over researchers and artists to study and depict species and landscapes characteristic of Brazilian biodiversity—two naturalists, Carl Friedrich von Martius and Johann Baptiste von Spix, were struck by the diversity of vegetation in a forest that was theoretically rare for the region around the banks of the São Francisco River in what is now the municipality of Januária, in Minas Gerais State. Their fascination was largely justified by the fact that the vegetation was in an area that was part of the Caatinga, an ecosystem identified by a predominantly semi-arid climate and scarce, highly variable water availability. The two German naturalists probably thought, like many others, that the Caatinga is a homogeneous environment, but that is not the case.

“The region has a wide variety of environmental conditions that are essential to the emergence and sustenance of a number of species well adapted to the regional climate,” said biologist Bráulio Almeida Santos of the Federal University of Paraíba (UFPB), in a lecture he presented at the fifth BIOTA-FAPESP Education Conference Cycle, on June 20, 3013 in São Paulo.

The Caatinga, he explained, presently occupies 11% of Brazilian territory, an area approximately 845,000 square kilometers (km²) in size. It is divided into eight ecoregions—each having very distinct landscapes, soil types and vegetation—that can receive rainfall of less than 1,000 millimeters in a year’s time. “In some areas, a dry spell can last as long as 11 months,” he said. The region is currently experiencing its worst drought in 30 years, affecting the lives of 27 million people. In the state of Bahia alone, over 214 municipalities have declared a state of emergency this year.

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Article and photo courtesy of Revista Pesquisa FAPESP.

New porcupine species discovered in Brazil

Fox News Latino, 04/11/2013

A new species of porcupine was recently discovered in the jungles of Brazil – but it’s already being considered an endangered animal.

Known by the locals as “coandu-mirim,” the rodent was given the scientific name “Coendou speratus.”

Antonio Rossano Mendes Pontes said his team found the rodent, which is covered in dark brown spines with reddish tips, in a small and isolated patch of forest in the northeastern state of Pernambuco in the Northeastern Atlantic Forest, one of the world’s most threatened habitats. With just 2 percent of the region’s original forest habitat still standing, the newly discovered porcupine must already be considered endangered, Pontes said.

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Brazil undertaking a 4-year long study of biodiversity in the Amazoin rainforest

AP/The Washington Post , 01/25/2013

The Brazilian government says it’s undertaking a four-year, $33 million study of its vast Amazon rainforest to compile a detailed inventory of the plants, animals and people that live there.

Environment Minister Isabella Teixeira on Friday signed an accord with the country’s national development bank, which is funding the study. The government says the inventory will help in formulating environmental policies aimed at preserving the forest and preventing deforestation.

Last year, Brazil lost 4,656 square kilometers (1,797 square miles) of Amazon to deforestation. That’s the smallest amount on record.

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Rio+20: reasons to be cheerful

John Vidal- The Guardian, 6/27/2012

Read the post mortems and commentaries from Rio+20, and you’d think a global disaster had taken place. The UN multilateral system is said to be in crisis, the environment is falling off the edge, and every blade of grass and hillside is for sale. Pundits and NGOs scream that it was “the greatest failure of collective leadership since the first world war”, “a bleak day, a disastrous meeting” and “a massive waste of time and money”.

Perspective, please. Reaction after the 1992 Rio summit was uncannily similar. Countries passed then what now seem far-sighted treaties and embedded a slew of aspirations and commitments into international documents – but NGOs and journalists were still distraught. They said the climate change agreement was too weak, that sustainable development was too abstract a concept, that the promised aid was inadequate, and that the US had guaranteed the felling of the Amazon forest by refusing to sign the biodiversity convention. There were, they said, no agreements on population growth or subsidies, or oceans, or trade, or women’s rights … and myriad other issues. In short, just like Rio 2012, the meeting was said to be a dismal failure of governments to co-operate.

I was pretty downhearted then, too. So when I returned I went to see Richard Sandbrook, a legendary environmental activist who co-founded Friends of the Earth, directed the International Institute for Environment and Development (IIED), and profoundly influenced a generation of governments, business leaders and NGOs before he died in 2005. Sandbrook made the point (I paraphrase) that NGOs always scream murder because it is their job to push governments, that pundits exaggerate because they are controversialists, and that UN conferences must disappoint because all views have to be accommodated.

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New monkey species discovered in the Amazon

Damian Carrington – The Guardian, 08/25/2011

Scientists on an expedition backed by WWF-Brazil to one of the last unexplored areas in the west of Brazil have discovered a new species of monkey. Photograph: Julio Dalponte/WWF

 

A monkey sporting a ginger beard and matching fiery red tail, discovered in a threatened region of the Brazilian Amazon, is believed to be a species new to science.

The primate was found in relatively untouched pockets of forest in Mato Grosso, the region that has been worst-affected by illegal deforestation and land conflicts. Julio Dalponte, the scientist who made the discovery, said it showed the extraordinary biodiversity of the area and the vital importance of conservation.

The expedition, backed by conservation group WWF, also found probable new fish and plant species, all of which are now being studied. “We have taken an important step towards gaining better knowledge of the fauna in the western Mato Grosso region, which is still a puzzle with many pieces missing,” said Dalponte.

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The Brazilian tribe that played by our rules, and lost

Jacqueline Windh – The Guardian, 06/06/2011

Chief Raoni smokes a pipe while demonstrating against the construction of the Belo Monte hydroelectric dam. Photograph: Reuters/Ueslei Marcelino

The man pictured above is Raoni Txucarramãe, chief of the Kayapó people, who hail from Brazil’s northern Pará province. The homeland of the Kayapó is the tropical rainforest surrounding the tributaries of the giant Xingu river, itself a nearly 2,000km long tributary of the Amazon. But the livelihood of the Kayapó people is under grave threat. Brazil’s president, Dilma Vana Rousseff, has authorised the construction of a dam that will flood their homeland.

The Belo Monte dam will be the world’s third-largest hydroelectric dam (after China’s Three Gorges dam, itself with numerous problems, and the Brazilian-Paraguayan Itaipu dam). It will flood 400,000 hectares of the world’s largest rainforest, displacing 20,000 to 40,000 people – including the Kayapó. The ecological impact of the project is massive: the Xingu River basin has four times more biodiversity than all of Europe. Flooding of the rainforest will liberate massive amounts of methane, a greenhouse gas far more damaging than carbon dioxide. But the impact on Chief Raoni’s people, on an entire society, is unimaginable.

The Kayapó traditionally practised slash-and-burn agriculture on small farms cut into the jungle. The rich resources of their lands (minerals, timber, and potential hydroelectrical power) have brought pressures from outside. Although the Brazilian constitution explicitly prohibits the displacement of “Indians” from their traditional lands, it provides for one convenient exception: where the National Congress deems removal of the people to be “in the interest of the sovereignty of the country“. Proponents of the dam argue that its construction is in the nation’s interest.

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Brazil calls for fairer share from genetic resources

Chisa Fujioka – Reuters, 10/19/2010

Brazil will not sign up to new global targets to protect nature without agreement on a U.N. pact that would give developing nations a fairer share of profits from their genetic resources, a top envoy said on Tuesday.

Delegates from nearly 200 countries are gathered in Nagoya, Japan, for a two-week U.N. meeting to fight rapid losses in plant and animal species from the destruction of forests, rivers and reefs that are vital to livelihoods and economies.

The same meeting is also trying to finalize years of negotiations to set rules on how and when companies, such as pharmaceutical firms, and researchers can use genes from plants or animals that originate mainly in the developing world.

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