Funding cuts and fear of retribution are hampering scientists’ response to the Amazonian deforestation crisis.

6 December 2019

JOAO LAET/Contributor
A labourer watches a fire that spread to the farm he works at in Mato Grosso State, Brazil, on 23 August.

Brazilian researchers investigating the cause and extent of wildfires in the Amazon are so afraid for their jobs that they have published their findings in a leading journal anonymously.

A new paper on the reasons behind Brazil’s August fire crisis contradicts the official narrative from the Brazilian government that the fires fell within the historical average.

The report states that the fires were related to the sharp increase in deforestation that coincided with President Jair Bolsonaro’s time in office. Several authors have withheld their names for fear of retribution.

“We regret this was necessary,” the team, led by Jos Barlow, a conservation scientist from Lancaster University in the UK and the Federal University of Lavras in Brazil, wrote in the acknowledgements of the paper, published in Global Change Biology on November 15.

One of the named authors, Erika Berenguer, says local researchers were so shaken by the unexpected sacking of Ricardo Galvão, director of Brazil’s National Institute for Space Research (INPE), that some are now afraid to publically report their findings.

Galvão was dismissed in August after President Bolsonaro questioned the INPE satellite data that first hinted at a sharp uptick in deforestation and multiple fires.

“That a scientist was fired for doing his job, it sets a precedent that we’ve never had before,” says Berenguer, an ecologist at both the University of Oxford and Lancaster University in the UK.

“It creates a landscape of fear, because people don’t know what might happen when they publish their data. They are concerned about their future and if they could suffer some sort of governmental retaliation.”[…]

Read More: “Landscape of fear” forces Brazilian rainforest researchers into anonymity