Spy in the sky to protect rainforest
Copyright 2001 Daily Mail & Guardian
October 16, 2001
By
ALEX BELLOS
The Amazon, one of the world’s remaining wilderness areas, is about to get a long-awaited aerial monitoring system to help protect the Brazilian rainforest against illegal exploitation
The $1,3-billion Amazon surveillance system (Sivam) will be up and running, in the next few months.
The new system will be able to catalogue and map Amazonian land better than before, and be able to detect forest fires and deforestation with more accuracy than the current methods. It will also be able to locate illegal airstrips with relative ease and see if people are invading land belonging to indigenous tribes.
Colonel Paulo Esteves, Sivam’s director of communications, said: “When we used to be accused by other countries that we were not looking after the rainforest properly, we always gave the excuse ‘It’s too big and we don t have the resources.’ The only way to keep a check on what’s going on is from the air.”
The Brazilian Amazon is ideal for clandestine flights and a liability to civil aviation.
Smugglers, wildcat miners, loggers and drug traffickers can fly around the vast area without fear of detection. In the 1980s, during the gold boom, a small airport in the north of the Brazilian Amazon is believed to have had more takeoffs and landings than any other airport in the world.
Esteves insists that even though Sivam is being installed by the Brazilian air force, it is not a military project.
“The principal object is to promote sustainable development ... to be able to use our resources without harming the biodiversity. And to stop destruction.”
The Brazilian Amazon covers about 5,2-million square kilometres, and makes up 60% of Brazil’s land area. It contains a third of the world’s remaining tropical rainforest, and about 30% of the world’s biodiversity.
The aim of properly harnessing the rainforest’s resources has been a long-standing dream of successive Brazilian governments. In the late 1960s the military regime built the huge Trans-Amazon Highway, which served only to quicken deforestation.
But Esteves said that Sivam would not be used for destructive purposes. “We have learned from our mistakes.”