Cerrado

The Cerrado has lost at least 30 Olympic swimming pools of water every minute, according to an unprecedented data analysis carried out by Ambiental. In 24 hours, the volume would be enough to supply Brazil for three and a half days. The investigation takes into account the predominant portion of six large basins in the biome.

The data displays an alarming picture, given that eight of Brazil's 12 hydrographic regions originate there. Water flows from north to south, feeding stunning rivers such as the Araguaia and Paraná. The Cerrado is so central to the country's water supply that many compare the biome to a heart, pumping life to all corners, ensuring water supply, energy generation, irrigation, and rainfall cycles.

The threats to this abundant water, perhaps the country's greatest asset, come from the adversities of extreme weather and radical change in land use in recent decades, especially with the advance of agribusiness exports over the Central Plateau.

Despite the growing danger, the biome still occupies a secondary place in the public debate on conservation policies. It seems to be a ghost landscape, almost invisible. Literally: most of its unique characteristics are hidden underground, in deep roots, cave systems and gigantic aquifers. It's no different from a cultural point of view. Peppered on the surface by large fields of shrubs and forests, a beauty that is sometimes not immediately recognizable, the Cerrado has always been a less valued natural space, even by its urban population, who have often never experienced the biome and therefore feel no connection with it.

Above all, there is a lack of recognition among the Brazilian population that many of their daily demands have to do with the Cerrado. “It's common to find people indignant about the shortage of water in their taps, or farmers fearful of a crop failure due to the irregularity of the weather. A housewife or a restaurant owner who is upset about the rising price of food. Still, none of them associate these problems with the deforestation of the Cerrado,” says Yuri Salmona, a geographer and PhD in Forestry Sciences at the University of Brasilia (Unb).

Water, Pushed to the Limit

Developed by Ambiental, the project Cerrado – the Sacred Link of Brazil's Waters conducted an unprecedented analysis of the flows of important river basins in the biome since the 1970s, based on data provided by the National Water and Sanitation Agency (ANA). They are the basins of the Araguaia, the Paraná, the Parnaíba, the São Francisco, the Taquari and the Tocantins Rivers.

Considering all six basins in an analysis of the minimum safe flow (Q90), the conclusion is that the Cerrado is pumping 1,303 m³/s less water, comparing the periods of 1970 - 1979 and 2012-2021. It's worth repeating: that's 30 Olympic-sized swimming pools every minute. This figure indicates the minimum volume of water that passes through a river in 90% of the flow records. Authorities must take the Q90 into account when making such decisions as whether or not to grant licenses.

At the same time, water demand in the biome has increased due to the expansion of irrigated areas for soybean cultivation and other agricultural commodities. The analysis considered different land use and land cover patterns over a 37-year period, based on data from MapBiomas – collaborative network of co-creators formed by NGOs, universities and technology companies, that maps land use and cover in Brazil. Native vegetation shrank by 22% across the six basins, while the area dedicated to soy expanded nearly twentyfold: from 620.7 thousand hectares in 1985 to 12 million hectares in 2022. “Deforestation has been the main factor affecting water security in recent decades,” summarizes Salmona, the project's scientific coordinator.

This scenario is compounded by the impact of climate change, clearly felt throughout the Cerrado by the generalized increase in potential evapotranspiration (ETp): the total amount of moisture that is transferred from the soil and vegetation to the atmosphere. In other words, more solar radiation is falling on the biome and there is an acceleration in water loss, making it difficult for plants to survive in the dry season.

There is also less rain. Rainfall in the six basins analyzed decreased by 21% when considering the averages of the two different periods: 1970 - 1979 and 2012 - 2021. What's more, the precipitation pattern has changed and rains come at a shorter interval. “The rainy season has been reduced by practically two months,” says Salmona.

What does all this mean? A decrease in the volume of the precious liquid that should seep underground, feed aquifers and water tables and guarantee the Cerrado's role as a water regulator. With so much rain concentrated in a short period of time, the water doesn't have time to infiltrate. The soil becomes saturated and the rain runs off the surface and with force, generating floods and erosion. “It doesn't have to stop raining for there to be a drought scenario. All it takes is for the water to come at the wrong time,” says Salmona.

A Reckless Cycle

Authorities have already forecast the exhaustion of Brazil's water resources. In early 2024, the National Water Agency published a study which predicts a reduction of up to 40% in water availability by 2040 given the drop in rainfall and increase in evapotranspiration due to climate change. It is possible that major river basins in Brazil's North, Northeast and Center-West regions will fall to very low levels. “In the near future, the ANA and state management bodies will have to act to minimize possible conflicts, especially between the electricity and agricultural sectors, in order to make the different uses and interests of water compatible,” says Saulo Aires de Souza, the agency's climate change coordinator.

To understand the state of conservation of the Cerrado's water reserves, geographer Yuri Salmona and other authors participated in a study in 2022 which concluded that the Cerrado could lose 34% of its water volume by 2050. That's a third of its water! A total of almost 24,000 cubic meters per second, equivalent to the flow of eight Nile Rivers. Of all the water already lost, 56% is due to deforestation and soil change and 44% to climate change.

The expansion of plantations and pastures is responsible for 46% of Brazil's greenhouse gas emissions and is accelerating what Salmona refers to as a reckless cycle: irrigation and deforestation for the production of agricultural commodities combined with climate change generate increasingly intense droughts which, in turn, affect water, energy and food security, as well as the agricultural production itself.

Without a balanced rainfall regime, the vegetation cover becomes more susceptible to fire during the dry season, as attested to by the devastating fires of the winter of 2024. To make matters worse, this is when the use of irrigation intensifies to ensure the operation of agricultural areas.

The Cerrado's communities realize that the ecosystem is suffering, with a reduction in food-growing areas and the presence of invasive species. Natural fires caused by lightning, for example, take place at the beginning of the rainy season, when the humidity prevents fires from being harmful. But with the drier climate, areas that never used to burn, such as the swampy plains known as veredas – the biome's “sponges,” important for conserving water - now suffer because there's not enough humidity to contain the flames caused by human action. The ecosystems lose their regeneration period. “Fire and water are connected. You need water to have biomass to burn,” says biologist Mercedes Bustamante, a full professor at the University of Brasilia (UnB). “The intensification of fires affects local communities' traditional soil management.”

These are alarming figures that jeopardize the fate of a landscape whose original area spanned 2 million square kilometers – large enough to cover the combined area of France, Spain, Portugal, Italy, Germany, Belgium, the Netherlands and Slovenia. Around 5% of global biodiversity takes shelter in this mix of grasslands, savannas and forests, including 11,627 species of native plants.

The biome is considered the most biodiverse savannah on the planet. Half of its territory, however, no longer has its natural features – it has turned into farmland or pasture. Scientists and environmentalists have classified it as a biodiversity hotspot, in other words, an environment with a high variety and endemism of species that are suffering from the intense degradation of its habitats.

Above and Below Ground

The Cerrado is mostly anchored atop ancient mineral soils, large expanses of limestone rock that have been sculpted by wind and water. This is why it is home to some of the largest cave systems in Brazil, such as Terra Ronca State Park in Goiás and Peruaçu Caves National Park in Minas Gerais. This type of soft soil induces vegetation to have long roots that have evolved to search for water in deep regions during the dry season. As a result, most of the Cerrado's biomass is underground – hence its nickname: “inverted forest.”

As the biome largely occupies high portions of the Central Plateau, as the relief descends, the water tables get closer to the surface. Waterholes and river-forming springs appear. The impact of the rain is cushioned by the vegetation and runs into the depths, where it ends up being stored in aquifers such as the Urucuia, Guarani and Bambuí. “This process has turned the biome into an actual water tank. Like a sponge, it gradually releases all the moisture from the soil into the rivers,” says Salmona.

The Cerrado is the source of emblematic rivers such as the Xingu, the Tocantins-Araguaia, the Parnaíba, the São Francisco and the Pantanal. Paraguay and Argentina also benefit from the biome's water generation. Water from the Cerrado flows into the Paraná river basin, which supplies the Itaipu Dam, the largest hydroelectric plant on the continent.

Where does so much water come from? From the relationship between the Cerrado and the Amazon, in a dynamic of hydric feedback that connects and sustains the two biomes. Part of the rivers that feed the Amazon biome are born or have a large contribution of stored water in the Central Plateau. In turn, the rainforest's intense evapotranspiration is transformed into rain with the help of the equatorial winds that blow down from the Andes. These cycles of water vapor production – known as “flying rivers” – supply the Cerrado and then move on to other areas of the country.

Deforestation in the Cerrado has expanded the pocket of hot air that prevents these “rivers” from adequately entering the Central Plateau. This was one of the causes of the concentrated rains that caused the disaster in Rio Grande do Sul. “Water knows no borders,” adds Mercedes Bustamante. “But, often, discussions of environmental policies in Brazil disregard this connectivity in the ways that biomes function.”

Vegetation Mosaic

Three main types of native vegetation alternate in covering the Cerrado's entire area. The forest formation includes cerrado, dry forest, gallery forest and other types. The grassland formation is dominated by grasses, while the savannah has gradations of woody and shrubby vegetation, as well as grasses.

According to MapBiomas, the savannah is the formation that has been most impacted by crops and pastures. “As the forests are primarily located along rivers, it is more difficult to cut them down. On the other hand, in savannah formations, the topography and soil favor agricultural enterprises,” observes Ane Alencar, geographer and coordinator of MapBiomas Cerrado e Fogo.

Although the biome has specific environmental laws, they are less restrictive than in the Amazon. According to the Brazilian Forest Code, in the Cerrado located within the Legal Amazon – the regions in Mato Grosso and Tocantins, as well as part of Maranhão – the law allows landowners to clear up to 65% of the area of native vegetation; outside this territory, the figure rises to 80%. In the forest areas of the Legal Amazon, landowners can clear a maximum of 20% of their property.

The differences in the code determine different permissions for land management, “but they don't hold up from a biological point of view, considering the rare richness of the Cerrado,” says biologist Ricardo Bomfim Machado, a professor in the Zoology Department at the University of Brasilia (UnB).

These are nuances that require the government to find new forms of protection, such as the Action Plan for the Prevention and Control of Deforestation in the Cerrado Biome (PPCerrado), which is currently in its fourth phase. To make matters worse, there is illegal deforestation and the turbulent process of land regularization. “The Cerrado is being deforested more because agribusiness leaders are seeing less risk,” concludes Alencar.

Lobby for Fragility

Around 11% of the Cerrado's original area has some kind of environmental protection. A tiny fraction of this total (3.5%) is fully protected, including national parks, which are closed off to the extraction of resources and open to visitors, scientific research and environmental education. Only 15 of Brazil's 74 national parks are wholly or partially in the Cerrado, including the emblematic Chapada dos Veadeiros, Grande Sertão Veredas and Emas. The rest of the biome's protected territory is divided into sustainable use areas, such as extractive reserves, or Environmental Protection Areas (APAs), a type of protected area that doesn't ensure the conservation of biodiversity because it is more aimed at zoning and regulating land use.

According to biologist Bomfim Machado, the difficulty in creating protected areas in the Cerrado begins with the fact that the biome has become the stage for agribusiness. There is a huge political lobby against the demarcation of new areas. To make matters worse, a large percentage of the land has already become private, unlike the Amazon, which still has many portions of public land. As such, creating a reserve in the Cerrado implies greater expenses for the state to expropriate and pay for it. “The best strategy would be to involve private landowners in the conservation process, by creating private reserves for sustainable use,” says the biologist. “The balance between production and conservation facilitates business with importing countries. It would be like a green market.”

In what he calls the South of the Cerrado – an imaginary section of the biome below the latitude of Brasilia –, reality seems to block any big plans in this direction. Many landowners have a protection deficit, meaning that, in order to comply with the Forest Code, they would have to recover areas of grassland currently estimated at between 4 and 6 million hectares. But the north of the Cerrado, home to the largest percentage of the remaining native area, offers itself as “a new model of occupation that is environmentally correct and socially just.”

Utilitarian Relationship

More homogeneous, the tropical forests that cover the Amazon or the Atlantic Forest allow for a clearer idea of belonging between the inhabitants and the environment. In the Amazon, people recognize themselves as Amazonians; state governments present themselves as Amazonians. In the Cerrado, however, this is not the case, says Bustamante, to the extent that “the very identity of the native peoples has been lost. People don't easily distinguish the local indigenous people.”

What is the origin of this marginalized condition? According to the researcher, one answer lies in the Cerrado's central position in Brazilian territory, a convergence zone for biomes with antagonistic characteristics. As for the cultural aspect, she believes that the origin lies in our European heritage of valuing forest systems for exploitation. “We're ‘Brasileiros,’ not ‘Brasilianos,’ right? [Referring to the Brazilian demonym in Portuguese] In the semantics of the word, a ‘Brasileiro’ is someone who extracts brazilwood.”

The first commodity activity in the Cerrado was mining, which left a legacy of mercury contamination in inland Minas Gerais. In the 19th century, the vegetation was considered worthless and was replaced by extensive cattle ranching, started by soldiers returning from the Paraguayan War, the first major front for occupying the interior of the country. The Cerrado came to be seen as ugly vegetation, home to uncouth, backward people. “When this reality changed, it was to become the world's breadbasket, with the large-scale expansion of agriculture. A utilitarian identity,” analyzes Bustamante.

The Agribusiness Trap

The Cerrado's vast plains, predictable climate and abundance of water made it the ideal territory for the expansion of agribusiness in the mid-1970s, a central project of the military government that involved the creation of the Brazilian Agricultural Research Corporation (Embrapa). The biome became an open-air laboratory for advanced research that resulted in soil adaptation and the development of new seeds. Cotton and corn are grown, but the agricultural area is increasingly dominated by soybeans. “We're not occupying the land to produce food. Nobody eats soy,” warns Yuri Salmona.

To make matters worse, the model is supported by old tax exemptions from the federal government. The infamous Kandir Law states that mineral and agricultural products that don't come from manufacturing – that is, without industrialization, such as soybeans or fresh meat – do not pay the ICMS, Brazil's most ubiquitous tax, imposed on goods and services. So, instead of being transformed into oil, or some other manufactured product – capable of technological development, generating employment and adding value to the business – the absolute majority of Brazilian soy is shipped abroad without being taxed.

According to Salmona, the systemic trend of accentuating water stress has changed the dynamics of water governance. “The regional and national controls of the Cerrado's waters have been replaced by actors who dominate the global chain of agricultural products,” says the expert. This means that water from rivers and aquifers, instead of benefiting local communities or the Brazilian population, is increasingly in the hands of agribusiness corporations.

Brazil, Salmona continues, is trapped: the hegemonic discourse defends agribusiness as the pillar of the economy, but the country doesn't export grain, it exports water. “This 'virtual water' inside the grain, inside the meat, is an increasingly scarce commodity,” he says. The inability to trace production is an aggravating factor. “If you eat meat today, you don't know where it came from. If you ate something that used soy, you don't know where the grain came from either,”, he continues.

With the deforestation of the Cerrado, in the researcher's view, Brazil is simply continuing an economic model that has been perpetuated since 1500. There has been a succession of commodities for export: brazilwood, gold, rubber, coffee and, in recent decades, iron ore, oil, soy and meat. “This model hasn't turned Brazil into a Switzerland or a Norway. We are not a country with a high Human Development Index or one that gives due value to the knowledge of our peoples. Our model of occupation and production has to be rethought in order to incorporate productive capacity into the Cerrado, while there's still time to do so.”

Matopiba, the Death Blow

The issue of land ownership in Brazil, a controversy since the captaincies and sesmarias of the Portuguese Crown, has taken on new contours. In the Cerrado, millions of hectares of unallocated public land – the so-called wastelands – have long been used by traditional communities, who cultivated them or let their small herds loose according to the season.

In the region of Matopiba (an acronym for the states of Maranhão, Tocantins, Piauí and Bahia), small producers have always preferred to live and plant in the lowland areas, near the rivers and streams. The higher plateau areas were used communally. Without no “owners,” the vast areas served for seasonal cattle grazing. “But these areas are the filet mignon of agribusiness: they're flat and mechanizable,” says professor Ricardo Bomfim Machado of the University of Brasília.

With the advance of the agricultural frontier, this type of land has become the target of the so-called green land grab. Large rural producers, who have deforested their own land beyond the legal limit, take over these preserved common areas in order to legalize their claim and thus be able to obtain financing credits, for example. As the reserve areas must be untouched, the land grabbers push out families who have been using the land sustainably for centuries – often with the use of rural militias.

The rural residents are at a clear disadvantage in the quest for land titling, says Aryelle Almeida, a community lawyer from the Association of Rural Workers' Lawyers. According to her, as it is a self-declaratory process, powerful groups use modern resources such as georeferencing to identify rural extensions and even forge documents. “On the other, more fragile, side are the people whose families have been using the land for four or five generations. Elderly people in their 90s who argue: 'My grandfather was born here'.”

Green land grabbing fuels violence in the countryside, “and leaves the Cerrado increasingly vulnerable,” says Almeida, because it excludes the populations that have always been adapted to the characteristics of the biome and its capacity for sustainable production from the land management process.

“When the Matopiba project became a priority for the government to expand the agricultural frontier in 2014, farmers and agribusiness investors found cheap and abundant land. They simply occupied it,” says Bomfim Machado.

he project was implemented precisely in the states that had the highest percentage of conserved vegetation. According to the MapBiomas network, 61% of the 1,829,597 hectares deforested in Brazil in 2023 were in the Cerrado, an increase of almost 70% from the previous year. And three out of every four of the hectares lost from the biome were located in Matopiba. Almost all of the deforestation (97%) was caused by the expansion of the agricultural frontier. “Matopiba is the death blow for the Brazilian Cerrado,” says Marcos Rogério, a member of the Corrente River Basin Committee and the State Water Resources Council.

According to the National Water and Sanitation Agency, the biome is currently home to 80% of the country's central irrigation pivots, a threat to the aquifers. The challenge lies in managing the granting of licenses and monitoring their use. “Central pivots have a huge impact on the water issue because they are pumping water all the time and I think there needs to be better governance of these water licenses,” says geographer Ane Alencar of MapBiomas.

Three major rivers in the Matopiba region quickly became vulnerable with the opening of farms and the expansive use of pivots: the Ondas and the Arrojado Rivers in Bahia and the Corda River in Maranhão. Projections suggest that the Corda River will be exhausted by 2047.

In western Bahia, when extraction takes place in the areas that recharge the Urucuia aquifer, which are shallower and closer to springs, it affects the hydrological cycle in the basins of the Grande and Corrente Rivers, which contribute to 30% of the average annual flow of the São Francisco River, reaching up to 90% during dry periods. “These basins supply the great São Francisco system. The water comes from the springs in this region,” says Andréa Leme, a professor at the Federal University of Rio Grande do Norte (UFRN) in the Development and Environment Program (Prodema).

The expansion of irrigated agriculture and the suppression of vegetation in the west of Bahia coincided with a 31 km³ reduction in the volume of the Urucuia over two decades.

Disputed Water

In Correntina, Bahia, where 99% of the licensed water today goes to the plantations, the lack of balance in the sharing of the resource between large rural producers and the local population culminated in an episode that became known as the Water War. In 2017, a year of drought and El Niño, the communities of family farmers and rural residents were suffering from the drought when the Institute for the Environment and Water Resources (Inema) granted a permit for a farm's megaproject: the daily removal of over 300 million liters of water from the Arrojado River. The company already had a license to extract a huge volume from the same river. It was the trigger for the revolt. On November 2nd, a group of family farmers invaded the farm and destroyed its irrigation structures. The repercussions in the national press spotlighted the issue of poor distribution of water resources in Bahia's Cerrado.

The atmosphere of tension has never eased in the municipality, where more and more permits are being granted for groundwater use. Each of Correntina's estimated 200 wells is between 200 and 300 meters deep, generating around 500,000 liters of water per hour – a total of 9 million liters per day. “A single well can supply the town for three days. The population of 12,000 consumes around 3 million liters of water a day. That's the difference,” says community leader Marcos Rogério.

In the region, the communities practiced family farming that depended on waterlogged areas, planting rice in peaty soils where buriti palms grow. Among the rural residents' practices are water wheels and irrigation gullies, inherited from the migrants who fled the drought in the backlands. “These are communities with centuries-old knowledge and ancient relationships with the rivers which come from the indigenous peoples,” says Marcos Rogério.

Another example of how traditional ways of life have been affected by water scarcity lies in the Cerrado's literary landscape, the marshy plains known as veredas. The landscape that guided the wanderings of the sertanejos and their horses in Guimarães Rosa's masterpiece Grande Sertão: Veredas is suffering in the face of deforestation, fires and the depletion of its rivers.

In the Alto Jequitinhonha region of Minas Gerais – the state that produces the most eucalyptus in the country —, water scarcity has been a reality for decades. Small local farmers remember a time when water was plentiful even in the dry season, a source of abundant extraction. “We used to go around the plateau and pick jackfruit, pequi, gravatá, jatobá,” recalls José Carlos Xavier, a resident of the Campo Alegre community. The country people came to depend on cisterns and water delivered by trucks and saw the diversity of their food dwindle. “With the eucalyptus plantations, the springs have diminished. Many have dried up,” says family farmer Salete Maciel of the rural community of Gentio, in Turmalina.

Studies by the Federal Institute of Northern Minas Gerais (IFNMG) and the Federal University of Minas Gerais (UFMG) link the water crisis to the replacement of native vegetation by the eucalyptus monoculture. “The native vegetation manages to use around 50% of everything that comes from the rains to supply the water reserves in the soil and eucalyptus monocultures only manage to drain around 29%. This leads to a cumulative water deficit,” says Vico Mendes Pereira Lima, an agricultural engineer and professor at the Federal Institute of Northern Minas Gerais.

Even so, in the first half of 2024, Congress passed and President Lula signed Law 14.876, which simplifies the environmental licensing process for planting pine, eucalyptus and mahogany for commercial purposes, such as the manufacture of charcoal, cellulose and wood.

How to Manage the Water?

A key issue in the development of future environmental policies in the Cerrado, the policy for the management of Brazilian river basins was born out of good concepts. The 1988 Constitution made it possible to create a national system to manage water resources, which was established in January of 1997 with Law 94.333, the Water Law. “In theory, the law is quite innovative, pointing out that the management of the resource must involve public sectors, communities, civil society and large-scale users – those who take water directly for their production processes, such as industry, agribusiness or a sanitation company,” says biologist Angelo Lima, Executive Secretary of the Water Governance Observatory.

This decentralized and participatory model led to the implementation of the so-called River Basin Committees (CBH). Of the current 243 committees, 80 are in the Cerrado. In theory, the Basin Plan – drawn up by the committees after public hearings, diagnosis, prognosis and proposed actions – should define local water availability. As a result, the National Water Agency or the state management body would have a reference for granting concessions for use. The problem is that not every committee currently has a plan, and so conflicts arise. Sectors with economic and political power obtain larger grants, even though the law guarantees that, in situations of scarcity, the predominant use of water is for supply. “There is a challenge in terms of social representation on the committees,” says Lima.

For Yuri Salmona, it is essential to have stricter regulations for the authorization of large-scale irrigation. “The law states that permits must guarantee and prioritize access to water for human use, and not for irrigation for commodities,” he adds.

In Angelo Lima's assessment, another key point for effective water management is charging for use, which does not occur in all basins. Agricultural powerhouses such as Bahia, Mato Grosso and Mato Grosso do Sul still don't charge. “This is the instrument capable of guaranteeing resources for the committee to develop the plan and implement the actions to recover the basin.”

Paths for the Cerrado

The study published by Salmona's group in 2023 points out priorities to start reversing the scenarios of destruction. Water management is a fundamental point. At the same time, the Rural Environmental Registry (CAR) must establish itself as a land-use planning instrument capable of guaranteeing that properties’ required nature reserves are within the micro-basin where each property is located and that they are expanded in critically endangered basins. “Compensation within the micro-basin ensures that there is a recharge area for the system and that the hydrological cycle isn't so impacted,” says the researcher.

In the view of biologist Mercedes Bustamante, conservation planning needs to take place on smaller scales. “Only a manager at the municipal level can design a permit to remove vegetation that spares the most impacted watersheds,” she says.

Other possible solutions include increased strictness in granting permits for legal deforestation, establishing new conservation units and implementing the National Integrated Fire Management Policy.

We also need to encourage the development of local production chains, with zero deforestation and a more sustainable economic logic with the use of biotechnology. How can we create new opportunities? In the Cerrado states, by incorporating such fruits as baru, pequi, araticum and everything else that can come from the biome's socio-biodiversity into school lunches, for example.

“We can't keep thinking of a trade balance based on exporting soybeans,” warns agronomist Rodrigo Lilla Manzione, professor of water resources at São Paulo State University (Unesp). “We will also have to change the way we use water and make adaptations towards an agriculture with conservationist practices and agroforestry systems,” he says.

And, on top of everything else, we cannot create a conservation strategy for the Amazon that includes the deforestation of the Cerrado as part of the solution. The land use laws have to be the same.

The demand is urgent. The systematic destruction of the Cerrado “is ecocide,” as denounced by congresswoman Célia Xakriabá, a combative representative of the region's indigenous peoples. She is working for the approval of PEC 504, which would transform the Cerrado and Caatinga biomes into national heritage, an important step towards a new mentality of conservation.

The deforestation of the Cerrado further destabilizes the climate and disrupts the normality of the hydrological cycle. This is why ignoring the destruction of the biome, adds Salmona, is a gesture of both social and environmental ignorance and prejudice. “We can't trade water and biodiversity for soy, grass and eucalyptus.”