Brazil’s environmental agency has issued a permit to build a broadband highway through the heart of the Amazon rainforest. Trees are being cut down for this purpose, with illegal loggers joining legal ones.
The Amazon rainforest is the most valuable natural resource not only in Brazil but in the entire world. It produces approximately 20% of the Earth’s oxygen. That is why the Amazon rainforest is called the “lungs of the planet.”
During his election campaign, President Jair Bolsonaro promised that the BR-319 highway would be built to connect Manaus, the largest city in the Amazon, with the rest of Brazil. There is an outdated road there, built back in the 1970s. It quickly fell into disrepair in the tropical forest. Most of the route is an impassable stretch of mud, especially during the rainy season, which lasts about six months.
According to environmental experts, the construction of the road has encouraged illegal loggers. Now it will be easier for them to seize remote and relatively untouched areas of forest. Researchers say the new highway project will lead to a fivefold increase in tree felling by 2030. As a result, Brazil’s tropical forests will shrink by an area the size of the US state of Florida.
Under Jair Bolsonaro, Brazil’s forests have already suffered from loggers, and now the process will accelerate, say conservationists. The country’s infrastructure minister, Marcelo Sampaio, was quick to assure his fellow citizens that the builders would treat the environment with care, Reuters reports.
As previously reported, the authorities of the Democratic Republic of Congo announced the upcoming destruction of tropical forests. An international auction will be held there, offering 30 oil and gas blocks in the reserves of the Congo River basin. These forests are the largest absorbers of carbon dioxide. They are home to more than a thousand species of birds and more primates than anywhere else in the world, including apes: gorillas, chimpanzees, and bonobos.
