By Jake Spring
SAO PAULO (Reuters) – Brazil’s environmental agency spent less than half of its budget for enforcement last year, despite soaring levels of destruction in the Amazon rainforest, according to an analysis of federal spending released on Tuesday.
Deforestation in Brazil’s Amazon rainforest hit a 15-year high in 2021, government satellite data showed, clearing an area larger than the U.S. state of Connecticut.
Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro has often railed against what he calls overzealous enforcement of environmental laws, but he softened his tone last year under international pressure from the United States and Europe.
At an Earth Day summit organized by U.S. President Joe Biden, Bolsonaro pledged to double the budget for environmental enforcement among other efforts to help protect the Amazon.
The money was later made available to federal environmental agency Ibama, whose enforcement budget grew to 219 million reais ($41 million), public records show.
But Ibama only spent 41% of that money last year, the advocacy group Climate Observatory said in an analysis of the final 2021 budget figures. Reuters confirmed the calculations.
Bolsonaro’s office did not respond to requests for comment.
Most of the unused money has been committed to other spending by Ibama in 2022, such as acquiring equipment, according to a Reuters review of budget figures, rather than directly funding field operations, which the enforcement budget also covers.
The agency spent about three quarters of its overall 1.8 billion reais budget last year, mostly on payroll, pensions and other obligatory spending.
Ibama told Reuters in a statement that the most appropriate way to measure public expenditures was through this amount that had been committed, even if the money had yet to be spent.
But Climate Observatory said that the funding could have instead been spent on direct efforts to fight accelerating deforestation last year.
Suely Araujo, a former head of Ibama and policy specialist at Climate Observatory, said that while the agency always rolls some money over to the next year, it was unusual to push so much spending forward.
In the three years before Bolsonaro took office in 2019, Ibama spent between 86% and 92% of its enforcement budget each year.
“For it to be effective, you have to look at what is spent and paid, not just what is committed. If it’s committed, there is no way to know if it will actually materialize,” Araujo said.
($1 = 5.3050 reais)
(Reporting by Jake Spring; Editing by Brad Haynes and Bernadette Baum)
