Scientists and environmentalists are calling Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva’s re-election a major victory for the Amazon rainforest.
“President Lula will have four more years to save the Amazon,” said Carlos Nobre, a professor of climate and sustainability at the University of São Paulo and co-chair of the Science Panel for the Amazon, a group of hundreds of scientists studying the rainforest.
Brazil controls some 60 percent of the Amazon. Under Mr. Lula, who sought re-election after winning the presidency in 2022, deforestation fell to record lows. His administration revived environmental enforcement and pushed ambitious policies to protect and restore parts of the ailing rainforest.
The Lula government had set a target of completely halting illegal deforestation by 2030, and announced a plan to regenerate vast swaths of rainforest. At international climate talks in 2023, Brazil announced an initiative to regrow six million hectares of the Amazon by 2030, and another 18 million by 2050.
“It’s very clear that President Lula, re-elected, will continue with his very good policies to protect the Amazon,” Dr. Nobre said. Had he lost, he said, “it would have been ecocide.”
In the lead up to the election, conservationists had said that deforestation could again surge if Lula’s opponent, Flávio Bolsonaro, won. Mr. Bolsonaro, a right-wing senator and son of former President Jair Bolsonaro, had said that he does not believe that climate change is caused by humans, and had promised to remove barriers to farming, ranching and other activities in the Amazon.
If deforestation of the Amazon were to continue unchecked, scientists have said that the Amazon could see significantly less rain and could degrade from lush canopy into a drier, savannah-like ecosystem by 2050.
Mr. Bolsonaro had defended mining and farming on protected lands, and said during his campaign that “the biggest way to address the subject of environmental issues is what we did during the Bolsonaro government,” a reference to the presidency of his father, under which deforestation in the Amazon accelerated and more than 17,000 square miles of forest were cleared.
President Lula’s victory on Sunday also drew approval from leaders of Brazil’s Indigenous communities who had mobilized against Mr. Bolsonaro. “We have to elect people who won’t destroy our rights, who won’t destroy our forests, and who won’t cause the kind of impact that comes from all the talk by other politicians about, rare earths, illegal mining,” said Alessandra Korap Munduruku, a prominent Indigenous leader of the Munduruku people from the Tapajós River basin.
Mr. Lula’s re-election comes as far-right politicians in Brazil have posted major legislative victories. As a result, a conservative National Congress is set to take over in Brasília in February, complicating the prospects of any environmental agenda by the Lula administration.
At the same time, Mr. Lula’s re-election provides a crucial “counterweight” to a conservative legislature that might otherwise open the Amazon to development or weaken environmental protections, said Christian Poirier, program director at Amazon Watch, an organization monitoring the rainforest.
“Congress would have worked in tandem with Bolsonaro to dismantle these safeguards,” said Mr. Poirier.
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