Sao Paulo: A bill to reduce the size of four Amazon conservation reserves in Brazil and eliminate another may be related to proposals by mining industries to begin work in those areas, investigators from a conservation organisation say.
“We noticed that the majority of those exploitation requests are within the limits of the conservation units that the new bill wants to cut,” said Mariana Ferreira, the science coordinator for WWF-Brazil, a non-governmental environmental protection organisation. The national bill, proposed by legislators from Amazonas state, aims to eliminate the Campos de Manicore Environmental Protection Area and reduce the size of Acari National Park, the Manicore Biological Reserve and the Urupadi and Aripuana national forests. The protected areas were created last year, before the impeachment of President Dilma Rousseff in August.
But “even after the creation of those conservation units in 2016, the mining industry didn’t stop requesting official licenses to exploit minerals within the protected areas”, said Ricardo Mello, coordinator of the Amazon programme at WWF-Brazil.
The more-than-20-page bill describes the conservation areas proposed for reduction or elimination only as geographic coordinates, without maps, and does not provide a reason for the change, WWF-Brazil said.
But maps created from the coordinates by the conservation organisation show that proposals to begin mining – particularly for gold, but also for diamonds and niobium, used in steel and superconductors – have been filed with the government in all the areas, the NGO said.
The mining proposals are available from a national database of requests by industry for mineral prospecting and extraction. In Acari National Park alone, about 40 requests for prospecting or mining minerals, mainly gold, have been filed, WWF-Brazil said. Some have already been authorised, according to the organisation.
According to President Michel Temer’s chief of staff, Eliseu Padilha, the proposed cuts to conservation areas are being analyzed within the Ministry of Environment.
However Jose Sarney Filho, the country’s environment minister, has indicated he is against the changes.
“The minister is against the project because any change in conservation units demands technical advice from the Chico Mendes Institute for Biodiversity Conservation, an agency linked to the Ministry of Environment,” the ministry replied via email, when asked for comment. Brazil’s forests are under pressure not only from mining but also expansion of agriculture, creation of large dams and timber harvesting.
