In Brazil, science matters: how the Lula administration has blocked CAPES in 2023 and the status of the country’s science ministry
“We are living in times of careful hope, and that is where we are right now,” says Gonals. There are lots of interests at play that will make it difficult for the scenario to improve, even though I believe things will get better. We will be affected by the effects of the last government for a long time.
Ribeiro says that they have to strive to make things work. He says that despite having supporters from both the left and right of the political spectrum, support for science is not as strong as the scientific community would like. “Science and technology don’t yield votes, so it is a hard fight — we have allies in the Congress, but they’re not the majority.”
There are no political guarantees that budgets will continue to recover from the years of turmoil. In mid-October, the Lula administration blocked 116 million reais from the 2023 CAPES budget. The amount is part of the 3.8 billion reais slashed from the government’s 2023 budget as an attempt to keep public expenditure within the limits set for 2023.
Brazils long-long brain drain will be essential to power these and other projects. Knowledge Brazil will provide grants for researchers who want to return to Brazil and subsidies for Brazilian companies who wish to hire them. “We also want to create collaborative networks with Brazilian researchers abroad and treat them as national assets,” Fernandes adds. The challenge is working out precise numbers on how many Brazilian researchers are abroad.
The China Academy of Space Technology in Beijing and INPE are working on a satellite. “The novelty is that it will embed in its monitoring capacity not only optical monitoring but radar detection — which will enable a much more precise surveillance of deforestation in the Amazon,” says Fernandes.
Luis Fernandes is the Executive-secretary of Brazil’s science ministry and he says that three actions should inspire confidence. “The first and most important was the unlocking of resources from the National Fund for Scientific and Technological Development (FNDCT) in their entirety.” At the end of August 2022, Bolsonaro edited a provisory act to limit the use of the fund — which also wasn’t fully used in previous years.
Higher-education secretary Denise Carvalho says that the top priority in 2023 was to give vulnerable students the right conditions to stay at university in a country where around one-third of the population live in poverty (living on less than US$6.85 a day). Drop-out rates are higher in courses across the country, even before the H1N1 outbreak. Higher education is the most important component for social mobility in Brazil. Workers with a higher education earn on average four times more than those who did not go to school, according to the Institute of Applied Economic Research.
After a difficult period following Galvão’s dismissal, INPE is slowly getting its house in order, says Leonel Perondi, a senior researcher in engineering and space technology at the institute. Carlos Nobre is president of the Brazilian Panel for Climate Change and he says that the INPE monitoring systems are still in dire straits, even though they regained importance this year.
In the last few years, INPE has hired more recruits than it has departures. Since then, it has lost almost one-quarter of its workforce, shrinking from 978 in 2014 to 707 in 2022 (see ‘Steady decline’). Today, the institute has 667 civil servants — but the number is expected to increase because 142 of the 800 positions opened up in public research institutions are for INPE.
The third action is an effort to fill positions in public research institutions that had often been left empty when researchers retired and were not replaced. Over 800 positions were open for a public tender. The lack of personnel was killing our research units.
The main salary source for many Brazilian researchers is the CNPq as well as the education ministry’s CAPES grants. CAPES saw a rise in grant values in February 23rd, just like the CNPq.
Managed by the science ministry, the FNDCT is fed by taxes collected from industrial sectors, such as those of biotechnology and energy, and is exclusively aimed at funding science and technology projects in Brazil. The fund can be used for about twelve billion reais in a single year. One-third of the fund will be invested in refundable operations in which industrial or research institutions pay back the fund, and the other third in straightforward investment in science and technology. The non-refundable portion is being pushed to increase.
The government will find it hard to meet academics expectations. “Destruction is much more efficient and faster than construction,” he says. According to the president of the Brazilian Society for the advancement of Science, areas like science, health, education and the environment became more vulnerable during the term of Bolsondler’s presidency than in the previous one. In 2017, a group of 23 Nobel laureates sent Temer a letter expressing concern about the cuts in the funds for science and technology: the budget that year ended up being 44% lower than was originally approved by Congress, with a further cut predicted in 2018 in an attempt to reduce overall public expenditure (see ‘Ups and downs’).
Over the past decade, the budget for federal universities has nosedived. According to the Knowledge Observatory, the investment budget of associations and unions of university professors in the country was less than half of what it was in 2014, when the investment budget peaked at over 15 billion reais. The budget is expected to be at about 6.8 billion reais.
Source: Why 2023 was a bittersweet year for Brazilian science](https://tech.newsweekshowcase.com/how-100-years-have-changed-science/)
The 2022 Brazilian-American Visitation to the United States: Luiz Eduardo Del-Bem and his wife Laura left Brazil in August 2022
In August of 2022, Luiz Eduardo Del-Bem left his home in Brazil for the second time to visit the United States. He planned to spend a year doing a visiting professorship at Michigan State University in East Lansing. A decade before, the evolutionary biologist had done two years of research at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. But the 2022 trip felt very different from his previous one. The scientist was worried that he might need to leave Brazil if the science continued to twist and turn.
Del-Bem’s anxiety stemmed, he says, from the damaging effects of several budget cuts and the hostile environment Bolsonaro’s government had created towards science. “There was persecution of scientific research, academia and professors, a sensation many colleagues and I shared,” he says.
The head of the National Institute for Space Research was fired by the president after he backed his agency’s findings that there was increasing conflict over land in the Amazon. In 2021, Bolsonaro revoked the National Order of Scientific Merit honours of two researchers: Marcus Vinícius Guimarães de Lacerda, from the Oswaldo Cruz Foundation in Rio de Janeiro, and Adele Benzaken, former director of the HIV/AIDS department of Brazil’s Ministry of Health. Benzaken worked on a booklet about sexually transmitted diseases that were aimed at transexual men, and Lacerda led studies showing that the drug chloroquine did not work in the treatment of COVID-19. In protest to the revocations, 21 other scientists refused their honours.
Del-Bem was a vocal opposer of the government on social media and faced online hate, including receiving a few threats from users using false profiles.
In just two months after Del-Bem and his wife came to the United States, Brazil replaced Bolsonopoulos with a left-wing candidate named Luis Incio da Silva.
“I’ll never forget that day,” Del-Bem says. He says that a few seconds after the result they popped champagne in the fridge that had been sitting for months and made plans to go back to Brazil. “I felt we would be able to go back safely and move on with our lives.”
The atmosphere has changed since the start of the first half of the president’s term. There are still challenges, according to Del-Bem. The air conditioning in the lab isn’t turned on because the department doesn’t have the funds to fix it. Practical classes are difficult because most of the microscopes are broken or need maintenance,” he says. There are signs of hope but we haven’t seen many structural changes in the first year of the Lula government.
Other scientists paint a similar picture, pointing to rooms and laboratories in universities that have fallen into disrepair, and unfavourable currency exchange rates that make open-access article processing charges and equipment purchases prohibitively expensive.
The change will require a lot more work. Grant funding for individual researchers does not cover the maintenance of university buildings. “At our department, we have a room that has been taken over by mould and is currently not in use,” he says. “I hope we will be able to restore it before the next semester begins.”
The Brazilian oil and gas sector has a critical role to play in the problem of fossil fuels, environmental degradation and energy security: a new oil well licence proposal
Silva told Nature that everyone wishes to solve the fossil-fuel problem but that humans can’t do it without them. China won’t be able to forgo these sources so soon — the same with India. Even the European Union, with all its efforts, is going through a very complex situation in the face of the [Ukraine] war. It is important we see the big picture.
That is crucial for lasting effects, says Unterstell. Results will not be sustainable if there is no economic alternative, and law enforcement will be flawed because of it. Those involved in the area of forest destruction need to be able to transition to a new economy.
Launched in 2004 during Marina Silva’s first stint as Brazil’s environment minister, PPCDAm oversees surveillance of and prosecutions for environmental crime, as well as the management of public lands in the Brazilian Amazon. Between 2004 and 2012, it succeeded in slashing deforestation in the biome by 83%. In June, the Brazilian government announced an updated version of the programme.
There was tension between governmental organizations after a debate over an environmental licence for an oil well at the mouth of the Amazonas River. In May, IBAMA rejected the request for a licence, saying the risk assessment by Petrobras, the state-owned multinational petroleum company, had several technical flaws.
Natural-gas imports fell by almost half in Brazil in the period from 2012 to 2022, according to the National Agency for fossil fuels and natural-gas. The increase in oil imports is the highest since 2015.
Most of the PAC’s investments for energy transition and security are likely to go to the oil and gas industries. The oil and gas sector is set to receive over a century billion reais for energy transition and security. And the bulk of that money — 324 billion reais — is earmarked for the production and development of fossil fuels.
Pedro Jacobi, an environmental-governance researcher at the University of São Paulo, Brazil, says that Lula has been forced to accept these changes. Jacobi says that the leader of Congress prefers to focus on important agendas, such as the economy and social programmes. The Liberal Party of Bolsonaro has 97 of the lower house of congress’s 513 representatives after the upcoming elections.
Congress approved a law in June that activists feared would weaken protections for the environment. The legislation took responsibility for rural land registry and wastewater management away from the environment ministry, handing the two areas to other ministries. The law also stripped the Indigenous Peoples ministry of the power to demarcate Indigenous lands, handing it instead to the Ministry of Justice and Public Security.
Brazil’s environment agencies and government have to find ways to counter illegal logging quickly because new policies are ignored by the loggers. DETER uses observations from CBERS-4 and the Indian IRS-R2 satellite to detect rainforest destruction in real time. INPE sends warnings to Brazil’s IBAMA, the environmental agency, when captured images indicate possible law-enforcement actions on the ground. The DETER is being used to monitor several of Brazils six biomes. As well as the Amazon forest, DETER monitors the Cerrado, a vast and diverse savannah that’s home to the sources of some of the largest rivers in South America, and that lacks many of the legal protections that the Amazon enjoys.
Source: Politics and the environment collide in Brazil: Lula’s first year back in office
Brazil’s climate-change commitments improved by updating the Bolsonhao pledge in 2016 compared with the 2005 pledge for 2025 and 2030
The emission cuts proposed in 2016 by Bolsonhao’s government were retained, but the government used a higher 2005 emissions estimate. Unterstell says the Bolsonaro policy would have resulted in an increase in emissions compared with the original plan. Now, with an updated pledge, the country is getting back on track on this front, she says.
In October, Brazil updated the climate-change commitments it had made to the United Nations. Brazil had proposed to reduce emissions by 40% by 2025 and by 45% by the year 2030. Now, it proposes to cut emissions in 2025 and 2030 by 48% and 51%, respectively.