LUIZ Inacio Lula da Silva, who promised to end deforestation in the Amazon rainforest, has been declared the president of Brazil after narrowly defeating Jair Bolsonaro.
Lula's win on Sunday is not just a win for Brazil, but for the world, too. How so? The Amazon rainforest, 60 per cent of which is located in Brazil, is a global carbon sink. For this reason alone we, though some 17,000 km away, must join the rest of the world in celebrating Lula's return for the third time to rule a country where most of the world's green lungs are located.
The Amazon is of critical importance to the people around the world. Covering 6.7 million sq km of South America, it is a global source for food, water and medicine. And a great climate stabiliser.
According to research by Greenpeace, around 100 billion tonnes of carbon is stored in the Amazon rainforest. That's 10 times the annual global emissions from fossil fuels. Without the Amazon, the world's war against climate change is as good as lost.
Bolsonaro's reign has been really a bad one for the Amazon. As deforestation and forest fires continued to destroy the global carbon sink, his government looked the other way. If the Worldwide Fund for Nature (WWF) is right, just in the first six months of this year, deforestation in the Amazon was three times higher than in the first-half of 2017. Sure, we can't blame Bolsonaro for all the ills in the Amazon.
Bolivia, Peru, Colombia, Ecuador, Venezuela, Guyana, Suriname and French Guiana also host their share of the rainforest. To what extent these countries are to be blamed isn't clear. We shall not speculate.
What is clear though is that during Bolsonaro's term that began in 2019, illegal logging, mining and land-grabbing have soared in Brazil's part of the Amazon. Greenpeace, whose focus is on the Brazilian side of the Amazon, says in its website that forest areas the size of cities were being razed when Bolsonaro was president. The Guardian, the British daily, put it best: "Brazil's rainforest went from a carbon sink to a carbon source."
However, Lula's task isn't going to be easy. He takes over a very divided country and a Congress filled with Bolsonaro supporters. Be that as it may, he is already getting international help for his focus on saving the Amazon.
According to media reports, Norway is ready to release €485 million, which was witheld from the Bolsonaro administration, for use by the Amazon Fund For Forest Conservation and Climate Protection to begin its conservation work.
The fund was set up with Germany in 2008 when Lula was president. Norway and Germany's faith in Lula isn't without basis. During his two terms as president previously, he is said to have reduced deforestation substantially.
Now his zero-deforestation policy must please more than Norway and Germany. The world must help. The Amazon is not called the world's green lungs for no reason. Not only Brazil needs the Amazon rainforest alive, the world needs it alive too.