Ricardo Galvão states that he has already digested his dismissal and gives a class on monitoring the Amazon at Unicamp
After his dismissal as director of the National Institute for Space Research (Inpe) became official due to a clash with President Jair Bolsonaro, Professor Ricardo Galvão was immediately contacted by a doctoral student: “I am very happy at Inpe, which has the best remote sensing course in the country [the only one with a grade of 7] and I have a class with an advisor who is called a liar by the president. You are not going to do anything?". “It really touched me. Because we in the scientific community know that someone saying that a scientist lies about his results will mean the end of his career. Especially if you are the president of the republic”, recalls the USP professor, who was at Unicamp to talk about “Inpe and the monitoring of Brazilian biomes”, on October 31st.
Ricardo Galvão admits that the initial blow was big, as he never expected, at his age, to have to face the President of the Republic. “When I made the decision to respond forcefully, of course I knew I would be exonerated. On the other hand, the feedback I received from society and academia, not only in Brazil but also abroad, helped me get through this difficult period of transition. In a way, I can say that I digested [the dismissal] and returned to USP, where I am remaking my life as a researcher. Difficult to digest is the fact that I had another year in office and many plans to do.”
For the former director of Inpe, his successor, Darcton Policarpo Damião, was an intelligent choice by Marcos Pontes, Minister of Science, Technology, Innovations and Communications (MCTIC), and should not harm monitoring activities. “Whoever replaced me is a retired Air Force officer and, naturally, has good dialogue with government staff. As he completed a master's degree at Inpe and a doctorate at UnB precisely on the sustainable occupation of the Amazon, he understands the subject and should also have a good dialogue within the Institute. Furthermore, due to all this conflict, the government will not want Inpe to go backwards now; he will invest resources and make it successful, I believe in that.”
Just remembering the public clash, on Friday, July 19, President Jair Bolsonaro accused Ricardo Galvão of providing false data about deforestation in the Amazon and of being at the service of an NGO. The former director of Inpe responded on Saturday, classifying the president's attitude as “pusillanimous and cowardly”, “a bar offense”. The data released by Inpe showed an 88% increase in deforestation in the Amazon forest in June, compared to the same period in 2018. “It was much more than that. What appeared in the press was just the surface, a consequence of something that began in January. I will talk about this in the lecture”, said Galvão.
The USP professor highlights that Inpe continues to publish data on deforestation, as promised by the new director, following a preventive criterion adopted during his administration, to guarantee inspection and fines. “Ibama continues to have immediate access to monitoring data, but they are now retained for five days before publication on the Inpe website. The measure is justified because already in the previous government, in 2017, the Ministry of the Environment identified that large illegal logging companies hired experts to access the data and find out whether they had been discovered or not. The agreement was so that Ibama would have time to act against illegal loggers.”
Regarding the serious oil spill that hit the beaches of the Northeast, the researcher explains that the required actions are outside the competence of Inpe, which has all its satellites focused on monitoring the Amazon and other Brazilian biomes. “The agency follows the task of earth observation. Its optical satellites take photos that record each type of soil according to reflectance (different color and intensity). At sea it is much more difficult due to the changes in colors and, to detect oil slicks, one must mainly use a radar satellite, with a synthetic aperture, capable of penetrating the water and measuring the differences.”
According to Galvão, Brazil does not have radar satellites, but could access those from other countries as a member of the international Charter consortium. “The government should have asked Inpe and did not do so, it took 41 days to take any action. In incidents such as an oil spill or eruption, a country can call other members to make their satellite images for that event immediately available. As far as I know, the government did not take action, showing ineptitude in dealing with natural disasters, without knowing how it should operate. In any case, it would be complex, since even the radar satellite, when passing through an area of the ocean where phenomena are not expected, stops taking the data, as it would be in immense quantity and difficult to store.”
Neither left nor right
In his talk in the packed IFGW auditorium, Ricardo Galvão displayed a graph that considers the best time series of tropical forest deforestation measurements in the world, with a 95% accuracy rate and which Inpe began developing in 1988. On the vertical axis The deforested area per thousand square kilometers is marked, while a dashed line is superimposed on the value bars marking the averages in the period between 1995 and 2005. “To the students who think that the attacks come from a capitalist government, the first thing I say is that Science does not belong to any political ideology, just as stupidity does not belong to any political party, everyone has a little.”
The USP professor points out in the graph the large deforestation peak of 29.100 km2 in 1995, during the Fernando Henrique government, and a second peak of 27.600 km2 in 2004, during the Lula government. “But in 2004 we had Marina Silva as Minister of the Environment. Unlike this government, which since taking office has never spoken to Inpe, Marina came to us, interested in the Prodes system [Brazilian Amazon Forest Monitoring Program by Satellite], which provides the annual deforestation rate in the country – but which It has no use for Ibama's actions, as deforestation has already occurred. Hence, the minister suggested a system that would provide daily warning of areas that are being deforested.”
Inpe then developed the Real-Time Deforestation Detection system (Deter), which, according to Galvão, served as the basis for its clash with the government. “It was with Deter that Marina Silva, Carlos Minc and Izabella Teixeira reduced the deforestation rate by almost 80% by 2012, to just over 4.500 square kilometers; system that, according to Minister Ricardo Salles, does not work. But we know that during the Lula government itself there were clashes between Marina Silva and Dilma Rousseff over deforestation in the Amazon, mainly linked to the two hydroelectric plants. After Dilma took office, Ibama's actions cooled down and deforestation began to grow again, reaching 7.500 km last year and expected to reach around 10.000 km this year.”
The former director of Inpe recalls that, although Bolsonaro denied him a personal conversation, he held a tense debate with minister Ricardo Salles on the program “Painel” on the Globonews on August 11, about the importance of preserving the Amazon. “They say we still have a lot to deforest. In 1500, the total Amazon was around 6 million square kilometers and the Brazilian Amazon was around 4 million. Since then we have deforested close to 20%, but the problem is in the rate: 11% of the 20% were since 1988. Everyone here has heard of the very important work of Carlos Nobre and other scholars: according to them, if the total Amazon is deforested by more than 25% to 40%, the tendency to become a savannah is irreversible.”
Atmospheric rivers
Ricardo Galvão also warns that deforestation on the Brazilian side is not uniform, being concentrated in the arc that descends through Pará, Maranhão and Mato Grosso – a region where the dry period is already lasting one to two weeks longer than in the rest of the Amazon . “A video on YouTube by Antonio Nobre (Carlos Nobre's brother) shows the famous tropospheric or atmospheric rivers. We see [on the world map] that in the latitude of the Amazon, almost everything is desert, but in the region, it is not. Why? Because the main flow of moisture comes from the Atlantic and, fortunately, we have the Andes, where for thousands of years this moisture has been hitting, coming back and creating the Amazon rainforest. The forest has trees with crowns measuring 10 to 20 meters and each pumps 600 to 1.000 liters of water per day – accounting for almost 20% of the water pumped into the planet's atmosphere. This is the water that goes down to Ushuaia [Tierra del Fuego], influencing agriculture and the entire rainfall regime in South America.”
One of the many reasons that the research physicist had for the strong clash with the Bolsonaro government – “it gave the impression that I lost my patience” – is in the report by with the BBC on July 25 showing illegal mining on indigenous land. “Inpe had given the alert on March 18, without any response from Ibama, and in May we gave more details, such as the coordinates provided by Deter, also without a response. I spoke with Minister Ricardo Salles behind the scenes of the debate [in Globonews] and he said 'that's nonsense because we need resources and it's important to extract niobium'. Brazil holds 90% of the world’s niobium reserves, why take more from indigenous land?”
The government's insistence on the mining business left the USP professor “with a flea in his ear”, even more so after he was in the Amazon (the week before the lecture at Unicamp) to record with a Dutch TV station and learned about the professor's research Alfredo Wagner de Almeida and his group at the Federal University of Amazonas (UFAM). “They do spectacular work not only on the issue of deforestation, but on how land is occupied in the Amazon. If the government wanted to create a sustainable development policy for the region, it wouldn’t even need Inpe, because what they have there is impressive.”
Almeida showed Galvão the map of the confluence of the Tapajós River with BR-163, forming the triangle where the combined fires occurred from August 10th, the “day of fire”, and between April and June Inpe gave at least 15 deforestation alerts for large areas in that region, without any action from Ibama. “In the Bolsonaro government we had 7.287 mining requests (licenses) across this entire area. What is the reason? Highway 163 is where the government wants to build a new bridge connecting Suriname – which the Dutch TV team would visit precisely to cover the mining, almost 90% of which is done by Chinese. There is a clear purpose to explore mining in the Amazon – not just the Brazilian Amazon, unfortunately – and the government is supporting this activity intensely, talking about injecting resources.”
Defense of science as a theme
The former director of Inpe gave a lecture lasting almost an hour and a half, with interruptions for sips of water – “I still get emotional, but I don't cry anymore” – when he recalled the attacks on the organization and its researchers, and especially the solidarity of the community national and international scientific research, as well as civil society. “I was worried about these attacks that started even before the government took office, with Bolsonaro's statements about 'environmentalist Shiites' and inspectors who just wanted to take money.”
On January 15th, continues Galvão, minister Ricardo Salles heavily criticized Inpe's alert system and, on March 31st, announced his intention to buy Planet's system. The day came that the professor defines as fateful, July 2, when General Augusto Heleno [head of the Institutional Security Office, GSI] declared to with the BBC that data on deforestation was manipulated. And there was also the president's speech at the opening of the United Nations General Assembly, on September 24, denying that deforestation in the Amazon is above average.
The USP professor highlights in return the immediate support from the academic and scientific community in Brazil, and also from numerous peers abroad, who even compiled data from NASA and the European Space Agency to confirm the Inpe information. “Colleague lawyers at USP asked if I wanted to file a representation against the president. But let's not let political and ideological convictions cloud our eyes when we have to defend science – I looked at the many good messages that excited me about this topic. I also went to see the reason for this modern obscurantism. Before, obscurantism involved extreme religious positions that opposed science; Now we have a denialism that opposes scientific results. We are back in the dark.”
When wondering whether there will also be a response from society, Ricardo Galvão, even though he considers that “social networks are for the demo”, places his trust in the students' ability to use these tools so that they can promote better scientific dissemination. “On the São Paulo Metro, a lady in her 70s approached me with her cell phone turned on, not for a photo, but to record: 'I wanted to thank you for the position you took in defense of the environment and the Amazon. Because for me, a São Paulo native, the Amazon was a little forest in the north of the country that had nothing to do with me. What happened made me open my eyes to the importance of preserving our environment. I started reading about it and, both at my work and in my parish, I created two working groups to, on social media, show politicians that Brazilian society does care about this.”
WHO IS IT
Ricardo Magnus Osório Galvão completes 49 years of public service next year. He began his scientific career at Inpe in 1970, but after a year he came to do his master's degree at Unicamp, where he remained as a professor at the Gleb Wataghin Institute of Physics until 1982. He obtained his professorship in 1983 from the USP Physics Institute (1983), at the which is still linked. He received his doctorate from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and a postdoctoral degree from FOM-Rijnhuizen in the Netherlands. He directed the Brazilian Center for Physics Research (CBPF) from 2004 to 2011 and presided over the Brazilian Physics Society (SBF) from 2013 to 2016. He is a member of the Council of the European Physics Society and the Brazilian Academy of Sciences (ABC). He spent time at the Aerospace Technical Center (CTA) between 1982 and 1986 and at Inpe itself between 1986 and 1991. In 2016 he was elected by his peers to the board of Inpe with a mandate until 2020.
