NEWS FROM THE FRONT DESK: As far as setting the bar on environmental destruction, one country’s upcoming election has far-reaching implications on global politics and business practices. This includes Australia’s supply chains for our built environment and the influences that can permeate our body politic, like a bad virus.
Brazil, a country whose leadership supports the destruction of the Amazon rainforest so that instead of being a carbon sink it is now a carbon emitter – not to mention enabling the terrorising and murder of Indigenous communities in order to pillage the natural gifts of this rare and precious natural resource – is about to undergo a critical election.
Far right populists don’t exist in a vacuum, clearly. A culture of environmental lawlessness relies on the close relationship between dodgy supply chains and those in power.
It’s easy to unintentionally support the destruction of nature if we don’t properly monitor supply chains. The last thing we need is to source materials that arrive on site dripping in the blood of Mother Nature.
It’s our job as an industry focused on a sustainability transition, to be vigilant. In fact, hyper vigilant.
We must source materials that do not prop up political leaders who abuse people and planet. We need to ensure that the materials we use in construction and our city building do not harm the environment and the Indigenous communities that depend on it.
Business interests have the power to be part of the solution and to stamp out the worst of these practices.
The presidential campaign has officially started with just six weeks left until its national election on 2 October. The globe’s fourth-largest democracy is facing a burning question: will far right populist President Jair Bolsonaro accept an election loss, or orchestrate a military coup to retain power?
The polls are tracking Bolsonaro’s steadily-loosening grip on power. His opponent, former president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva from the leftist Workers’ Party, is in the lead.
Although this might seem like a long way away from us here in Australia, Bolsonaro has positioned himself alongside populists such as Donald Trump, and Vladimir Putin – who is driving up energy costs in Europe and throwing fuel on the fire of global inflation. And he’s been very pally with Australia’s former prime minister Scott Morrison.
Dr Deborah Barros Leal Farias, Brazilian-born senior lecturer of politics and international relations at the University of New South Wales, told The Fifth Estate: “This is the most tense election Brazil has ever seen… It’s almost certain that Bolsanaro may lose and if he loses he will claim [the election] has been stolen.
“If he stays in the presidency, the climate will not be looking good.”
The situation has a lot of overlap with US president Trump and the 6 January insurrection, she said.
The outcome has far-reaching implications for the success of populist leaders across the world – and this has big implications on the climate front.
Look to the case of timber from Russia and Belarus being labelled by the Programme for the Endorsement of Forest Certification (PEFC) as “conflict timber” for lining the pockets of sellers “either to perpetuate conflict or take advantage of conflict situations for personal gain”.
Global environmental lawlessness
In simple terms, the outcome of this election will decide the fate of the Amazon – vital to preventing catastrophic climate change.
Under the political megalomania of Bolsonaro, anti-environmental policies have prompted what Bob Brown in an opinion piece labelled a culture of “environmental lawlessness” – that’s the “greenphobic” idea that people who take action to protect the environment should be stopped, “especially if it gets in the way of making money”.
Deforestation has surged, illegal mining and logging has run rampant.
Bolsonaro has presided over the destruction of the Amazon rainforest: under his watch, at least 26,000 square kilometres of rainforest have been cleared, prompting scientists to reveal in shock that the world’s largest rainforest is no longer a vast carbon sink. Now “the lungs of the world” emit more carbon than it absorbs.
This “environmental lawlessness” has led to the displacement and killings of Indigenous communities. Indigenous leaders and human rights groups say Bolsonaro should be tried for crimes against humanity.
In June this year, Brazilian Indigenous advocate Bruno Pereira and British journalist Dom Phillips were murdered and authorities’ failure “to fully investigate” made headlines across the world.
Bolsonaro has been accused of weakening environmental agencies, promoting illegal logging and mining in the Amazon, and has close ties to forest-destroying agricultural expansion.
There’s been a weakening of compliance and punishment, Dr Barros Leal Farias explains.
“If the law doesn’t have teeth any more, then what’s really stopping people from doing the wrong thing?
“He stops different agencies from meeting, people get fired and demoted for speaking out against the destruction of the environment, civil servants are actively targeted.
“He has removed punishments for wrongdoings. The ones that used to be regulated, became the regulators – so, a lot of power has gone to illegal miners, people who dump mercury into Indigenous lands and protected areas.”
Dodgy resource extractors are shaking hands with those on the throne.
On the other side, Bolsonaro’s opponent Lula wants to fight “the environmental devastation caused by the current government, to promote a Green New Deal” including an “ecological transition to a low carbon economy” – his 2020 “Rebuild and Transform Brazil” plan states.
The country needs to restore about 12 million hectares of forest to meet its Paris Agreement obligations, but under Lula that could grow to 17 million hectares.
Dr Barros Leal Farias says the last time Lula was in power (from 2003 to 2010) he “worked hard to fight the global view of Brazil as the bad guy” and tried to position the country “as an environmental leader”.
In the 2020 G20, the four leaders resisting global climate action where Xi Jinping, Bolsonaro, Putin and… Australia’s former prime minister Scott Morrison.
“In the last G20 meeting, when Morrison was left without friends, the only person he found – who no one else wanted to talk to – was Bolsonaro. The uncool kids table, who no one wanted to be with.”
The dodgy timber trade and how we can lend a hand to the Amazon and its Indigenous people
First we need to be hyper vigilant.
An estimated 50 per cent of tropical timber is illegally sourced. Brazil is ranked among the highest at risk of illegality in the timber industry – more than 70 per cent of Amazonian timber products may come from illegal operations.
In Australia, industry leaders like Woodhouse Timber rely on third-party certification so that their customers can be certain that timber products are ethically sourced.
Third-party supply chain certification is vital for this in the timber industry. “Chain of Custody” (CoC) tracks the forest product from its origins in a certified forest, to its end use.
Organisations like the Forestry Stewardship Council (FSC) also look at chain of custody certification from timber coupe to installation as a finished product, and look at considerations like Core Labour Requirements.
Other programs include the PEFC which is operated by Responsible Wood in Australia.
However, sustainability consultant Robin Mellon, of Better Sydney, says that some supply chains are more “hard to see” – and that human rights abuses run rampant, particularly in stone and landscape labour. But also in timber.
In December Brazilian environmental agents shut down more than 220 companies and 21 logging concessions that were using shell companies and fake shipment documents to cover up illegal logging operations in the Amazon rainforest, Reuters reported.
In May last year, federal police raided the environment minister’s home as part of an investigation into the illegal export of Amazon timber.
“He was ousted,” Dr Barros Leal Farias says adding that his demise was the result of an investigation into the possibility that he profited from illegal timber and mining.”
Another incident was the leak of a ministerial meeting during Covid, saying that the government should take the opportunity while everyone is focusing on Covid to change all the environmental legislation.
In 2019 a US$7.2 million (A$10.41 m) fraud scheme was revealed to be “laundering” endangered timber for export to the United States at a substantial markup.
The timber is laundered to try and sneak it past increasingly critical third-party supply chain certifications.
“Credits are … used to ‘cook the books’ of sawmills that are processing trees illegally logged from forests on Indigenous lands, protected areas or public lands,” a 2018 Greenpeace report stated, calling the Amazon’s timber trade a “flawed system of timber custody”.
Robin Mellon told The Fifth Estate: “When you’re talking about the Amazon rainforest, you’ve got deforestation, loss of biodiversity, human rights abuses, pollution, and climate change. You need to look at your supply chain.
“It doesn’t matter whether you’re talking timber or other products, look for third party certification. Ethical and responsible timber companies only source a small amount of their products from Brazil.
The problem is the “mostly untracked or unknown quantities – the stuff no one asks where it’s from.
“As to how much there is, I wouldn’t be able to put a figure on it.”
The business responsibility to prevent ecocide
Green groups supported by world leaders including French President Emmanuel Macron have been calling on the International Criminal Court to make this illegal destruction of the environment, or “ecocide”, an international crime – without much success.
Shifts in political power go a long way to changing this tide.
Yet so far there has been political constipation when it comes to taking action – and one must ask what is causing that blockage?
Again, it comes back to that close relationship between dodgy supply chains and those in power. It’s this that enables environmental lawlessness.
Handshakes between business interests and political power should not be an excuse to destroy our home – after all, we only have one.
Political parties need to step up to protect the environment and its defenders or be guilty of perpetuating the crime of ecocide and the human rights abuses that come with it.
Natural resource extraction, which our built environment relies upon, needs to set the rules and expectations when it comes to how far they can go to make a profit.
Business needs to set benchmarks for ethical practices.
The implications of elections such as the upcoming Brazilian election are far reaching and will create influences across the globe.
Our job in the built environment is to make sure we don’t enable the continuation of dodgy resource extraction that gives leaders like this oxygen.
“The golden rule,” Mellon says, is “if you don’t know where it’s come from, and cannot be sure of a transparent, sustainable or ethical supply chain, don’t use it.”
Yet here we are, as Australians, advocating for the cessation of our own sustainably managed, highly regulated native forest industries, as is occurring in Queensland, Victoria and Western Australia (curiously all under Labor-led governments).
We already have a $2B trade deficit in timber and wood products but we’re prepared to shift our environmental responsibilities overseas to far more dubious sources.
So much for being global (environmental) citizens!!