Brazil's plan to develop its Amazon rainforest by improving the area's infrastructure will cause environmental devastation that far outweighs any economic advantage, a report in the US magazine Science said yesterday.
The plan, Advance Brazil, which will see £27bn spent over seven years on roads, hydroelectric dams, railways and waterways, could leave only 5% of the rainforest intact by 2020.
US and Brazilian researchers spent five years using satellite images and computer modelling to estimate the destruction of the Brazilian Amazon, which contains about 40% of the world's tropical rainforest.
"If these development plans go through, we'll lose the largest remaining wilderness on Earth and a huge amount of the world's remaining biodiversity. And that, of course, doesn't even consider the enormous impacts on the car bon cycle, global climate and greenhouse warming," said Scott Bergen, a forecast scientist at Oregon State University.
According to the report the most optimistic levels of deforestation will leave 28% destroyed, 28% untouched and the remainder with different degrees of destruction.
"The Brazilian Amazon plays vital roles in maintaining biodiversity, regional hydrology and climate," said the report by the research team, led by William Laurance of the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute. "It also has the world's highest absolute rate of forest destruction,currently averaging nearly 2m hectares[about 8,000 square miles] a year."
Mark Cochrane, of Michigan State University, said: "We're trying to map out the implications to let [Brazil] know what the consequences are."
Since the government started building the Transamazon Highway three decades ago to link the jungle wilderness to the populated coastal areas, Brazil has had contradictory attitudes towards its last great frontier. It wants to harness it as a resource, yet is aware of the risks of deforestation and the wrath this incurs abroad.
Migration to the Brazilian Amazon has led to a big rise in its population over the last century to about 12m, according to provisional figures.
"We cannot leave the local population living in a glass bowl just for the benefit of rainforest preservation," said Jose Paulo Silveira of the department of planning and strategic investments. "We need to keep on developing."
He added that there was no intention to build new roads, just to improve existing ones: "We accept suggestions, but I don't entirely trust the precision of the study because of the data it used - some of which is out of date."
The Science report suggests the industrialisation is shortsighted because Brazil could lose up to £1.4bn a year in selling carbon credits - a practice which allows countries to meet pollution reduction targets by buying the unused quotas of other nations.
Mr Cochrane said deforestation was more subtle than the levelling of whole areas. "When you view these forests from a distance they look OK, but when you stand in them, you can see they've been thinned, and that they've changed," he said. "It's like they have holes punched in them. These holes can make a rainforest dry out."
Roads once confined to the Amazon's perimeter are now penetrating to its heart, bringing people that further stress the forest, he said.
"Unfortunately, there is little government control in the Amazonian frontier," added Mr Laurance. "Illegal logging and land-clearing are rampant. New roads that cut into the frontier almost always initiate a process of spontaneous colonisation, logging, hunting and land speculation that is almost impossible to stop."
