The deforestation of the Amazon is a tragedy, also because it is the consequence of a stupid economic decision, and could reach catastrophic proportions if the forest becomes savannah.
But, despite its capital influence on the country’s rainfall regime, for most Brazilians the Amazon is an abstraction, and its future is largely disregarded. Only 13% of the Brazilian population lives in the Legal Amazon states, but, more importantly, nine out of ten Brazilians live in urban areas, cities.
This is why discussing global warming for city dwellers is urgent too. Cyclones and other extreme events are increasingly common, and their consequences for cities like São Paulo are tremendous.
The lame afforestation plans and the carelessness with which municipal administrations have historically treated existing trees lead to an increasing loss of vegetation cover. And it gives you heat islands, even more severe storms, less protection against pollution, including noise, in a vicious cycle that feeds back on itself.
City halls are always late when the issue emerges: São Paulo’s city hall announced last year a plan to diagnose 650,000 trees, a census that has not been carried out for more than ten years.
In the midst of this, few voices try to be heard. One of them is that of botanist and landscaper Ricardo Cardim, an early advocate of the use of native species on public roads and in private projects, not only because this dramatically improves the environmental services provided by trees, but because Brazil is, by far, the most biodiverse country in the world.
For some time now, Cardim has been calling for a kind of Embrapa, this state-owned planning and development company that has done so much for our agriculture, for landscaping. Furthermore, it uses its digital networks to present native species, illustrating its strangely solitary thesis that the country only stands to gain from their dissemination.
He refutes his colleagues’ current argument that there is no scale of production of native species in the country.
But it can be said that its main workhorse these days is public afforestation. The current state of affairs led him to warn, in a text published in this same Folha, in December:
“(…) we could soon reach drastic situations such as extreme weather events in consecutive weeks, followed by the failure of the capacity of the electrical repair system, leading to dozens of days without electricity and all its chaotic consequences”.
In the text, it points out antidotes: “We have to plant millions of medium and large native trees in a technical-scientific way, shade all the asphalt, legally install sidewalks and road afforestation as the sole and exclusive responsibility of the municipality, plant between vehicle spaces as already done in Paris and Berlin and spray native forests in the neighborhoods (…)”.
Anyone who runs, walks or walks a dog knows how much more pleasant it is to be in wooded areas, especially in the summer. In January in São Paulo, the smell of privet, very common throughout the city, is deliciously striking. Like so many other species used here, it is exotic: it came from Asia and the Mediterranean coast.
Don’t tell Cardim.
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