BRAZIL will lose a quarter of its Amazon rainforest if a gigantic government
development scheme goes ahead as planned, an international scientific team
warned last week. “The fate of the greatest tropical rainforest on Earth is at
stake,” they say.
Road networks, hydroelectric schemes, gas pipelines and river channelling
projects will be built under a $40 billion programme called Advance
Brazil. Its goal is to expand mining, agricultural and timber industries across
the Amazon region. “This is a huge scheme,” says ecologist Philip Fearnside of
INPA, Brazil’s National Institute for Amazon Research in Manaus. Its budget
dwarfs the $340 million…
