Multiple systems are used to monitor deforestation in the Amazon and guide oversight
Vaccine stimulates the production of antibodies against cocaine in animal experiments
Although it was previously marginalized, hip-hop has become a popular research topic in the last 50 years
Sodium offers an alternative to lithium for electric vehicle batteries
The suicide rate among indigenous people is three times greater than that in the general population
PRESIDENT Marco Antonio Zago
VICE-PRESIDENT
Ronaldo Aloise Pilli
BOARD OF TRUSTEES
Carmino Antonio de Souza, Helena Bonciani Nader, Herman Jacobus Cornelis Voorwald, Marcílio Alves, Maria Arminda do Nascimento Arruda, Mayana Zatz, Mozart Neves Ramos, Pedro Luiz Barreiros Passos, Pedro Wongtschowski, Thelma Krug
EXECUTIVE BOARD
EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR
Carlos Américo Pacheco
SCIENTIFIC DIRECTOR
Marcio de Castro Silva Filho
DMINISTRATIVE DIRECTOR
Fernando Menezes de Almeida
ISSN 1519-8774
SCIENTIFIC COMMITTEE
Luiz Nunes de Oliveira (President), Américo Martins Craveiro, Anamaria Aranha Camargo, Ana Maria Fonseca Almeida, Anapatrícia Morales Vilha, Carlos Américo Pacheco, Carlos Graeff, Célio Haddad, Claudia Mendes de Oliveira, Deisy de Souza, Douglas Zampieri, Eduardo Zancul, Euclides de Mesquita Neto, Fernando Menezes de Almeida, Flávio Vieira Meirelles, José Roberto de França Arruda, Jó Ueyama, Lilian Amorim, Liliam Sanchez Carrete, Marcio de Castro Silva Filho, Mariana Cabral de Oliveira, Marco Antonio Zago, Maria Julia Manso Alves, Marie-Anne Van Sluys, Marta Arretche, Nina Stocco Ranieri, Paulo Schor, Reinaldo Salomão, Richard Charles Garratt, Rodolfo Jardim Azevedo, Sergio Costa Oliveira, Luiz Vitor de Souza Filho, Watson Loh
SCIENTIFIC COORDINATOR
Luiz Nunes de Oliveira
EDITOR-IN-CHIEF Alexandra Ozorio de Almeida
MANAGING EDITOR Neldson Marcolin
EDITORS Fabrício Marques (S&TPolicy), Carlos Fioravanti (Earth sciences), Marcos Pivetta (Exact sciences), Maria Guimarães (Biological sciences), Ricardo Zorzetto (Biomedical sciences) Ana Paula Orlandi (Humanities), Yuri Vasconcelos (Technology)
REPORTER Christina Queiroz
ART Claudia Warrak (Editor) Júlia Cherem Rodrigues and Maria Cecilia Felli (Designers), Alexandre Affonso (Infographics editor)
PHOTOGRAPHER Léo Ramos Chaves
IMAGE DATABASE Valter Rodrigues
TRANSLATORS Ricardo Lay (coordination & review), Tom Jamieson, Peter Hunrichs, Tiago Barnavelt, Jack Martin, Nancy Berube Lang, Mark Thompson
CONTRIBUTORS David Lapola, Diego Viana, Domingos Zaparolli, Guilherme Eler, Letícia Naísa, Renata Fontanetto, Sarah Schmidt, Suzel Tunes
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ADMINISTRATIVE MANAGEMENT
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PESQUISA FAPESP Rua Joaquim Antunes, no 727, 10o piso, CEP 05415-012, Pinheiros, São Paulo-SP, Brasil
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DEPARTMENT FOR ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT, SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY
SÃO PAULO STATE GOVERNMENT
LETTER FROM THE EDITOR
Constant vigilance
The Amazon has been in the public eye this century. As one of the most important remaining biodiversity reserves, its value for life on Earth is incalculable. The region also has an essential role in climate regulation, with an influence that extends far beyond the frontiers of this biome. Fears regarding the destruction of the rainforest motivate debates on its occupation and preservation, taking into account the perspectives of the indigenous peoples that inhabit the region and its population of close to 30 million.
A key issue for conservation is the capacity to monitor the region by satellite. Brazil is widely recognized for its monitoring capacity. Data are collected and analyzed by qualified specialists in the public sector and NGOs. The information that stems from constant surveillance allows for immediate action to avert real-time deforestation. It also supports policy-making, provides grounds for international negotiations, and feeds scientific and technological research that in turn fuels the production of more and better data.
The cover feature presents five different ongoing initiatives that monitor the deforestation of the Amazon, highlighting their traits, methodological distinctions, and uses (Page 6). It also discusses the TerraClass initiative, which maps the use of deforested land in the region (Page 14). Developed by Inpe, the Brazilian National Institute for
Space Research, and Embrapa, the Brazilian Crop and Livestock Research Company, the project resumed operations after a period of inactivity. The recently released radiography for the year 2020 shows that 14% of the land in the Amazon is occupied by pasture and agriculture.
The current international edition includes a collection of features published in Portuguese between July and December 2023. They cover a wide variety of themes, such as a project to develop a vaccine to treat cocaine addiction (Page 30), a survey that points to a higher incidence of suicide among indigenous peoples (Page 35), the origin of bees 120 million years ago in Gondwana (Page 38) and the Brazilian prototype of a sodium battery as an alternative for electric mobility (Page 46).
This edition’s interviewee took office as the president of the Brazilian National Library in 2023. Over 200 years old and holding more than 10 million items, the institution safeguards the country’s bibliographical heritage. Professor of comparative literature at UFRJ, the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, Marco Lucchesi, defined his mission as making the Library more accessible. Poet and writer Lucchesi spoke of his work at the institution and the importance of research in Literature and History for the translation of authors to Portuguese. Lucchesi himself is a translator, speaking more than 22 languages fluently (Page 16)
Alexandra Ozorio de Almeida | EDITOR IN CHIEF
3 LETTER FROM THE EDITOR COVER
6 The use of satellite systems for monitoring forest loss in the Amazon contributes to the pursuit of zero deforestation
14 EMBRAPA and INPE resume land use monitoring in areas suffering vegetation loss
INTERVIEW
16 Marco Lucchesi, president of Brazil’s National Library, translates work by Persian, Russian, and Turkish authors, among others
INDICATORS
22 The Annual Report shows that FAPESP increased funding in 2022
COMMUNICATION
26 A study identifies common mistakes made by researchers with insufficient English writing skills
6
PHARMACOLOGY
30 Progress is made in the development of a vaccine for individuals with cocaine addiction
EPIDEMIOLOGY
35 The suicide rate among indigenous people is almost three times greater than that among the general population
EVOLUTION
38 Bees emerged 120 million years ago on the supercontinent formed by what is now South America and Africa
GEOLOGY
40 The São Francisco River has straightened and deepened over the last 90,000 years
CLIMATE CHANGE
44 Mosses can remove 6.43 billion tons of carbon from the atmosphere per year
ENERGY
46 Researchers working on the first Brazilian sodium battery prototype
BIOTECHNOLOGY
50 A cardboard sensor could be used to monitor the water quality
SOCIETY
52 Fifty years since its initiation, the hip-hop movement is now the subject of Brazilian research in fields such as anthropology and education
POLITICAL SCIENCE
58 Federal Revenue data reveal a century of expansion by evangelical churches
ARCHAEOLOGY
62 Thousands of geoglyphs and the intentional production of terra preta suggest ancient occupation of the Amazon
66 PHOTOLAB
Cover Images taken by the Sentinel 2 satellite in July 2022 show deforestation in two areas of Rondônia: between the Madeira River and one of its tributaries, the Jamari River (cover), and in Cujubim (back cover). The earth-colored polygons are deforested areas and the small white patches are clouds. IMAGES SENTINEL 2 / ESA
FOREST GUARDIANS COVER
Multiple satellite systems monitor deforestation in the Amazon and provide support for the target of zero deforestation by 2030
Marcos Pivetta
On November 9, the Brazilian government released data eagerly awaited by the Brazilian public and the international community: the 36th official annual deforestation rate in the Legal Amazon, an area of approximately 5 million square kilometers (km²) that corresponds to 58.9% of the national territory of Brazil. The released figures were encouraging.
According to an estimate from the Brazilian Amazon Deforestation Satellite Monitoring Program (PRODES), run by the Brazilian National Institute for Space Research (INPE),
the deforestation area between August 2022 and July of this year reached 9,001 km², 22.3% lower than that in the previous year. The rate remained above 10,000 km² per year between 2019 and 2022.
Created in 1988, PRODES is the first and oldest initiative to use satellite imaging to monitor deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon, home to the largest tropical forest on the planet. The data collected by the program, recognized in international agreements and cited in almost 1,600 scientific articles, indicate that approximately one-fifth of the rainforest has been deforested in recent decades.
use images from Landsat satellites, after the USA and Canada.”
After PRODES and DETER, projects led by public scientific organizations, such as MapBiomas and the Institute for Humans and the Environment in the Amazon (Imazon), began monitoring deforestation dynamics and progress in the Brazilian Amazon via satellite image analysis.
Although they share points in common with the pioneering initiatives of the INPE, each pursues slightly different objectives and employs specific methodologies to produce data. They may adopt different satellites, for example, with different spatial resolutions and revisit times for each point in the Amazon. They may also analyze images automatically, using software alone, or together with the trained eye of a specialist. They all, however, publish calculations of the monthly or annual deforestation in the Amazon. Due to these characteristics, the results often do not coincide 100% with the information provided by PRODES and DETER. Experts do not consider these differences a concern, as long as the general overview portrayed by each initiative points to similar trends, such as an increase or reduction in deforestation.
“The public system for monitoring deforestation in the Amazon is good and reasonably robust,” said physicist Ricardo Galvão, president of the Brazilian National Council for Scientific and Technological Development (CNPq). “Initiatives by civil society are welcome and do very important complementary work.” Brazil has made an international commitment to eliminating deforestation in the Amazon by 2030.
In August 2019, Galvão was dismissed from his position as INPE director after having publicly defended the accuracy and fairness of the institute’s data on deforestation in the Amazon against unfounded criticism made by then-president Jair Bolsonaro and his ministers.
In 2004, the Real-Time Deforestation Detection System (DETER) of the INPE began operating alongside PRODES, issuing daily alerts on parts of the rainforest where vegetation loss occurs. These daily notices are intended for environmental agencies, which use this information to counter deforestation.
“Brazil is renowned for its remote sensing, an area in which we do First World work,” said engineer and geoprocessing specialist Gilberto Câmara, who was the general director of the INPE between 2006 and 2013 and now works as a consultant in the sector. “In the 1970s, Brazil was the third country in the world to
At the time, the annual deforestation rate calculated by PRODES exceeded 10,000 km, which is a value that has not occurred since 2008. The federal government questioned the veracity of this number and threatened to hire a private company to do the work of the INPE. The incident received international news coverage, but the idea of outsourcing the monitoring process did not progress.
The availability of several systems dedicated to observing and calculating the suppression of native vegetation in the Amazon allows official data to be confirmed, refined, or even refuted by the public. If PRODES and DETER fail to operate for some reason, alternatives are available. “These alternative systems can also function as a backup of INPE’s services,” said Imazon remote sensing specialist Carlos Souza Jr.
Jirau hydroelectric plant, on the Madeira River in the state of Rondônia, with deforestation areas on the right bank
To help better understand the similarities and differences between various systems, Pesquisa FAPESP summarized the main characteristics of five initiatives that monitor deforestation in the Amazon—four Brazilian and one from abroad.
PRODES
Remote sensing specialist Cláudio Almeida, head of INPE’s Monitoring Program for the Amazon and other Biomes, shared an interesting story regarding the projects that preceded and fostered the expertise needed to set up PRODES. In the 1970s, when official public policies aimed to encourage the occupation of the Amazon and the implementation of large agricultural projects, one of the federal government's concerns was how to ensure that financial incentives were being used appropriately.
“It was then that monitoring the Amazon using satellite images was conceived of as a way of ensuring the projects were being correctly implemented, to verify that areas of the forest were being deforested to make room for agriculture and livestock,” said Almeida.
This notion of progress began to be notably questioned as the environmental movement grew in strength during the 1980s. As home to the largest tropical forest on the planet, Brazil has become internationally responsible for the Amazon, which fulfills an important role in regulating the global climate, in addition to its high biodiversity. Against this backdrop, contrary to the prevailing
DEFORESTATION IN NUMBERS
philosophy of the previous decade, PRODES was created in 1988 with a simple objective: to estimate the annual deforestation rate of native forests in the Legal Amazon. The Legal Amazon—a designation established in 1953 with the aim of stimulating economic development in a region that stretches across nine Brazilian states—covers the entire Amazon biome in Brazil, as well as 37% of the Cerrado (a wooded savanna) and 40% of the Pantanal.
The Amazon biome in Brazil, where the tropical forest is located, extends across an area of almost 4.2 million km², equivalent to 49% of the national territory. The difference between the Legal Amazon and the Amazon biome is approximately 800,000 km², more than 9% of Brazil’s land. “It is important not to compare deforestation data from the Legal Amazon with data from the Amazon biome,” emphasized Almeida.
One unique aspect of PRODES is that it follows the so-called deforestation calendar, based on the fact that deforestation occurs most intensely during the driest time of the year. The PRODES year thus begins in August, at the beginning of the dry season, and ends in July of the following year. Notably, the data for 2023 cover the period from August 2022 to July 2023.
The type of deforestation recorded by PRODES is clearcutting, which is the complete removal
Areas deforested annually in km2 according to the five monitoring systems
The PRODES data are the
of forest cover from one year to the next. This is generally done to create space for agricultural activities or to establish urban areas or space for hydroelectric dams.
In 2022, PRODES began to measure deforestation occurring through the progressive clearing of vegetation. This process is slower, more difficult to detect by satellite, and can occur over a number of years. This type of deforestation is associated with selective logging and the use of fires.
Only deforested areas that reach a minimum of 6.25 hectares (ha) in size, equivalent to 62,500 square meters (m 2 ) or just over six soccer fields, are included in the calculation of the annual deforestation rate. Critics have claimed that the minimum size is too large, resulting in much deforestation being overlooked.
“In the Amazon, deforestation is carried out to establish large properties, areas of soybean monoculture, or cattle farms. It is not worth clearing small areas, which is very costly and laborious,” explained Câmara, who does not consider the size of the area monitored by PRODES as a significant limitation. “The 6.25-ha area is enough to take most deforestation into account.” The PRODES system already monitors deforestation in areas as small as 1 ha (10,000 m2), but it does not include them in the calculation of the annual rate. It is likely that it will begin to do so soon.
The system uses images from five satellites: Landsat 8 and 9, launched by the North American Space Agency (NASA) and the United States Geological Survey (USGS); Sentinel, from the European Space Agency (ESA); and CBERS 4 and 4A, a joint project by Brazil and China.
Landsat images form the main database of the system. To monitor the entire Legal Amazon, 229 satellite images from the Landsat family are needed. Each image, also referred to as a scene, cov-
ers an immense area of 32,400 km², just over four times the size of the São Paulo Metropolitan Area.
If areas of the rainforest are covered by clouds when the Landsat satellites pass overhead, CBERS and Sentinel images can be used to fill any missing data points. On average, any given area is observed by a satellite used by PRODES every 16 days. In practice, the interval between two images can range from 5 to 26 days.
The smallest information point within a Landsat image is the equivalent of a square measuring 30 by 30 meters (m) (0.09 ha or 900 m2), which is slightly larger than two basketball courts. Remote sensing experts thus described the spatial resolution (one pixel) of a Landsat image as 30 m. The minimum area of deforestation accounted for by PRODES, at 6.25 ha, therefore comprises 69.4 pixels. The number of CBERS or Sentinel pixels is even smaller. The images produced by the Chinese-Brazilian satellites exhibit a spatial resolution of 20 m. The European hardware offers a spatial resolution of 10 m.
To calculate the annual deforestation rate, approximately 25 technicians at INPE headquarters in São José dos Campos manually compare the best available images of what an area looked like at the beginning and end of the current PRODES year.
These experts delimit the newly deforested areas directly on a computer screen, identifying forest cover changes based on elements visible in the images, such as tone, shape, texture, and context of the deforested areas. “Our workforce is made up of many CNPq grant recipients. We need more staff hired on a stable basis,” said Almeida.
DETER
Sixteen years after PRODES, when deforestation rates in the Legal Amazon were on the rise, DETER was conceived as a tool to help combat the problem in near-real time. DETER issues daily deforestation notices automatically sent to
Deforestation patterns created by different activities (from left to right): burning, degraded area, forest clearing, and mining
government bodies and state environmental departments responsible for stopping deforestation.
These notices are also shared publicly online, usually on Fridays, with a one-week delay. The system also publishes monthly and annual deforestation totals following the PRODES calendar year. Although the DETER numbers differ from the PRODES numbers due to methodological differences, they typically indicate the same deforestation trends.
The DETER methodology has improved and been refined over time. From 2004 to 2015, data from NASA's Terra satellites and Brazil and China’s CBERS-2b were used, with a spatial resolution of 250 m. With these images, it was possible to issue deforestation alerts for areas larger than 25 ha. However, they did not allow DETER to differentiate between completely deforested areas and other areas suffering progressive degradation.
From 2015 onward, images from CBERS-4 and CBERS-4A and the Amazonia-1 satellite, which were designed and operated by the INPE, with a spatial resolution between 56 and 64 m, were used. “Today, DETER only uses images from satellites developed with Brazilian technology,” highlighted Almeida. This change enabled reducing the minimum warning area to 3 ha and separating alerts into two classes: deforestation and degradation. One of the three satellites passes over any given part of the Amazon at least every two days. This high frequency allows for continuous monitoring of the region, indicating that deforestation alerts can be issued in near-real time.
The total or partial removal of native vegetation in an area with no previous record of clearing is classified as new deforestation. Although it is not possible to define the exact day when the forest was removed in a given area, DETER associates the event with the date on which the satellite image was taken.
New areas are identified on a daily basis and manually, similar to PRODES, but by a different team of specialists. Ten technicians at INPE's
Belém unit analyze the images on computers. Deforestation alerts are separated into the categories of clearcutting, deforestation with vegetation, and deforestation due to mining. The degradation warnings include geometric selective logging, disordered selective logging, and wildfire scarring.
With this approach, the system can differentiate natural disturbances from ones caused by human activity. The former mostly exhibits irregular, nonlinear shapes, while the former generally exhibits geometric and linear clearing patterns.
SAD
In Belém, Imazon created the Deforestation Alert System (SAD) in 2008. Its objective is to monitor forest degradation and the clearing of native vegetation in the Legal Amazon on a monthly basis to shed light on associated dynamics and trends. “Having alternatives to PRODES and DETER gives civil society security and autonomy in the event that the INPE initiatives fail or are discontinued,” said Carlos Souza Jr., of Imazon.
The SAD system records clearcutting and degradation in areas as small as 1 ha. It uses images from the American Landsat 8 and 9 satellites and the European Sentinel 1A and 1B (both 20-m pixels) and Sentinel 2A and 2B (10-m pixel) satellites. Any given point in the Amazon is scanned by one of the satellites every five to eight days. The images are initially analyzed automatically using the Google Earth Engine, but they are all validated by experts before the data are finalized. The SAD publishes monthly deforestation statistics for the entire Amazon and the states in which it is located, as well as annual deforestation rates. “Normally, our data show 70% to 80% of the value recorded by PRODES, which we see as a strong performance given the methodological differences,” explained Souza Jr.
MAPBIOMAS
In 2015, the MapBiomas network began producing maps and data on changes in land use in Brazil (e.g., the presence of vegetation, agricultural activities, and urban structures) based on remote
Deforestation in an area of the Brazilian Amazon over almost 20 years
km
SYSTEMS THAT MONITOR THE RAINFOREST
Five of the main initiatives that produce data on deforestation in the Amazon
Prodes – Inpe 1988
Date started
Primary objective
Types of deforestation measured
To estimate the official annual deforestation rate of native forests in the Legal Amazon, calculate deforestation between August 1st of one year and July 31st of the next
Clearcutting (complete removal of forest cover from one year to the next). Since 2022, clearcutting has officially accounted for the progressive degradation of primary vegetation, a slower process that also leads to rainforest loss
Minimum monitored area
Source of images
Methodology
1 hectare (ha), but the calculation of the deforestation rate only includes areas above 6.25 ha
NASA’s Landsat 8 and 9 satellites, the ESA’s Sentinel 2, and the Brazilian/Chinese joint venture, CBERS 4 and 4A. Landsat images comprise the basis of the system. Their resolution is 30 meters (m). The CBERS pixel value is 20 m, and the Sentinel-2 pixel value is 10 m
INPE technicians compare the best available images of an area on a computer at the beginning and end of the PRODES year. They delimit the newly deforested areas directly on the screen. The estimated rate is released between the end of November and December
2004, with a change in methodology in 2016
To publish daily deforestation notices in near-real time with the aim of guiding environmental oversight
Clearcutting and progressive degradation
2008
To monitor deforestation and forest degradation on a monthly basis, with the aim of understanding dynamics and trends
Clearcutting and degradation
MapBiomas
2015
To map annual land use and coverage, these data were used to calculate deforestation
Clearing of primary and secondary forests
GFW 1997
To monitor changes in land use due to deforestation and wildfires, especially in tropical forests
Considers the tree canopy above 5 m; removal of vegetation by burning
3 ha
1 ha
Limitations
Clouds prevent complete images from being obtained in 5% of areas. Do not measure the clearing of secondary forest, a type of vegetation cover that spontaneously grows in abandoned deforested areas
CBERS-4 and 4A and Amazonia-1 satellites (Brazil), with spatial resolutions between 56 and 64 m. One of the three satellites passes over any given part of the Amazon every one or two days
The total or partial removal of native vegetation in an area with no previous record of clearing is classified as new deforestation. Areas are identified manually on a daily basis. The system differentiates between natural and man-made disturbances
The same as PRODES
Landsat 8 and 9 satellites and the European Sentinel 1A and 1B (both 20-m pixels) and Sentinel 2A and 2B (10 m-pixels) satellites. Every section of the Amazon is recorded by one of the satellites every 5 to 8 days
Images are processed automatically but verified by experts before the data are finalized. Monthly deforestation data
1 ha
0.09 ha
Landsat, with 30-m resolution, to calculate deforestation
Landsat satellites
Clouds disrupt the images, and the system does not measure the clearing of secondary vegetation
Images processed automatically using Google Earth, which publishes deforestation data once a year Fully automated tasks can lead to classification errors
Automatic image processing; shares consolidated deforestation data once a year
Automated tasks can lead to classification errors; does not differentiate between he removal of vegetation due to natural events or anthropic activities
SAD – Imazon
Deter – Inpe
sensing images automatically analyzed using the Google Earth Engine. It is thus able to calculate an annual deforestation rate for all the biomes in Brazil, including the Amazon.
Four years ago, the network—run by Observatório do Clima, a nongovernmental organization (NGO) that brings together universities, technology companies, and civil organizations—launched a project specifically to monitor the clearing of native vegetation across the nation. Referred to as MapBiomas Alerta, it verifies and refines deforestation warnings issued by other systems, such as DETER and SAD, and produces a public report for each area suffering deforestation.
These data are published weekly by MapBiomas Alerta and consolidated every year in an annual deforestation report (RAD). “Despite its name, MapBiomas Alerta does not provide warning about ongoing deforestation,” explained geographer Marcos Rosa, a technical coordinator at MapBiomas. “It uses high-resolution images to confirm whether deforestation has occurred in an area and cross-references this information with public data to classify the type of deforestation and produce a report.”
When there is sufficient evidence that vegetation has been removed, MapBiomas employs satellite imaging from a private satellite network called Planet. According to the American company, every point on Earth is recorded daily by one of its 200 satellites, at a spatial resolution of just 3.7 m. This suggests that the smallest visible
area within a Planet image covers approximately 14 m2, the size of a room in a house.
Every verified and refined alert produced by the SAD includes a report with high-resolution images before and after deforestation. The MapBiomas system can also be applied to cross-reference the geographic information of deforested areas with data from various public databases, such as the Rural Environmental Registry (CAR) and the Land Management System (SIGEF). “We are thus able to include information about the deforested area in the report and infer signs of illegality,” explained Rosa.
GFW
There are also international initiatives that publish regular data on deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon. The Global Forest Watch (GFW) is possibly the most impactful. Operated by scientists from the University of Maryland, USA, and funded by the World Resources Institute (WRI), a nongovernmental organization based in Washington DC, the GFW has been monitoring land use and deforestation since 1997, especially in tropical forests, such as the Amazon.
The initiative uses Landsat images and has adopted the minimum spatial resolution of these satellites as the smallest monitoring area of deforestation: 1 pixel of a Landsat image, measuring 0.09 ha. The information is processed automatically.
“The system focuses on the tree canopy above 5 m. It records the cutting of trees and the removal of vegetation by fire,” said geographer Jefferson Ferreira, head of the WRI’s program in Brazil. “It shows the loss of forest cover, whether due
Areas of preserved and deforested rainforest near the Capim River in the state of Pará, 2022
to deforestation or not.” The GFW publishes an annual deforestation rate for the Amazon every year, calculated from January to December.
SYSTEM LIMITATIONS
No deforestation monitoring system is perfect. Remote sensing satellites, which generally capture images in the infrared and visible light frequency bands, face a common problem: if there are clouds between their cameras and the Earth, the resulting images are often of little or no value. Data redundancy and the use of images from more than one satellite are therefore particularly important strategies.
Microwave-frequency radars on satellites can also be employed to overcome this obstacle. These observations are not blocked by clouds and can be obtained during the day or at night.
“The CBERS-6 satellite will feature radar technology,” said Galvão.
Although faster and less expensive, fully automated analysis of deforestation may overlook some forms of clearing that a trained human eye would spot, and it can even lead to erroneous alerts. “It is important to know the historical and geographical context of the location of the apparent deforestation,” stressed Câmara.
“Sometimes, automatic systems can interpret an image of an Amazonian floodplain obtained during the flood season as a sign of vegetation having been removed. However, this conclusion is wrong.” The image of a flooded floodplain resembles that of a clearcut area of forest. However, a technician must analyse only an image of the same area recorded during the dry season to verify whether vegetation is still present.
Satellite image from 2018 showing the region around the Amazon River covered by clouds, a feature that renders forest mapping by remote sensing more difficult
Despite criticism, Câmara is an advocate of machine learning for assisting remote monitoring of the Amazon. In 2014, he obtained funding from FAPESP's eScience program for a study on the use of big data from satellites to classify land use and cover with the aid of machine learning. Based on this research, the remote sensing specialist obtained funding from other sources to develop free software, namely, satellite image time series analysis (SITS), which is currently in the final testing phase to potentially replace PRODES. According to Câmara, the use of stateof-the-art deep learning methods makes it possible to achieve a 95% consensus between the visual interpretation of images by humans and the analysis performed by algorithms. There has never been so much information available on deforestation dynamics in the Amazon, which is necessary for the implementation of public policies designed to improve forest management and maintenance. “Every monitoring system makes the manager and society look at the problem differently. Today, we know the extent of deforestation, where it is occurring, and how fast. Sometimes, we can even identify who is doing the deforesting,” noted Ane Alencar, director of science at the Amazon Environmental Research Institute (IPAM). “The main challenge is to better understand the level of illegality of deforestation and implement more efficient enforcement actions, embargoes, and even restrictions on access to credit [for those who remove native vegetation].” n
The research project consulted for this report is listed in the online version
THE RETURN OF TERRACLASS
EMBRAPA and INPE resume the mapping of land use and cover in the Amazon, 14% of which is occupied by pasture and agriculture
Marcos Pivetta
What are the deforested areas in the Legal Amazon used for? In 2008, Brazil’s National Institute for Space Research (INPE) and the Brazilian Agricultural Research Corporation (EMBRAPA) launched the TerraClass project, with the objective of identifying how land (where natural vegetation has been removed) is being used. Based on the location and level of deforestation detected by the PRODES system, teams from both organizations used remote sensing to determine whether the rainforest had been cleared for crops, pastures, or, much more rarely, urban areas and other forms of occupation.
Amazonas
Tocantins
Mato Grosso
Maranhão
Amapá
Roraima
Pará
Rondônia
Acre
Manaus
Boa Vista
Macapá
Belém
Palmas
Cuiabá
Porto Velho
Rio
They created overviews of the Legal Amazon for five years: 2004, 2008, 2010, 2012, and 2014. Due to a lack of funding and personnel, TerraClass stopped conducting surveys in recent years. However, now it has returned. This new project, funded by the Ministry of Defense’s Management and Operations Center for the Amazon Protection System (CENSIPAM), recently shared 2020 land use data online. Due to methodological changes, it has not yet been possible to compare the information from 2020 with that from previous years.
In the past, TerraClass processed and analyzed data relating to the Legal Amazon, an area of approximately 5 million square kilometers (km2) encompassing the entire Amazon rainforest and parts of the Cerrado (a wooded savanna biome) and Pantanal. Currently, the project is generating information specifically related to the Amazon biome, which is approximately 800,000 km2 smaller than the Legal Amazon.
One of the reasons for this change was the creation of a Cerrado-specific TerraClass in 2018—the Cerrado is one of the largest agricultural regions in Brazil. This new approach thus eliminates overlaps and redundancies by using two distinct initiatives to focus on the two largest Brazilian ecosystems, which cover more than 70% of the national territory.
“We are just finishing the process of migrating the old TerraClass to this new format,” said agronomist Júlio César Dalla Mora Esquerdo of EMBRA-
PA Digital Agriculture in Campinas, one of the project’s coordinators. “We plan to make data for 2022 available soon.” The team also intends to look back into the past and map land use and cover for 2016 and 2018, at which time TerraClass Amazônia was no longer in operation.
The Brazil version of TerraClass was also created with support from the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics (IBGE) to map land use across all biomes in the country. “Knowing our national territorial dynamics will enhance the synergy between economic, social, and environmental development policies,” said Alexandre Coutinho, a researcher at EMBRAPA Digital Agriculture.
According to the 2020 data, 72.8% of the Amazon biome was occupied by native forest, while 3.7% was occupied by secondary forest (abandoned deforested areas in the process of regeneration). The total deforested area accounted for 17.6% of the total area, which was almost entirely used for livestock and agriculture. Pasture and soybean, along with maize and cotton, accounted for 14% of the surface area of the Amazon. Pasture covered almost nine times more land than crops. Areas classified as nonforest areas—comprising mainly nontree vegetation and, to a lesser extent, urbanized areas—represented 6.7% of the total
biome. Rivers and other bodies of water covered 2.7% of the Amazon.
TerraClass also revealed that 0.2% of the Amazon, equivalent to approximately 10,000 km2 of rainforest, was removed in 2020. “At the moment deforestation occurs, we do not know what the land will be used for,” noted Esquerdo. “We cannot, therefore, define the immediate use of the land.”
The TerraClass 2020 numbers are similar to those presented by the most recent MapBiomas survey. The initiative is facilitated by the Observatório do Clima, a nongovernmental organization (NGO) that brings together universities, technology companies, and Brazilian civil organizations. According to this NGO, 15.5% of the Amazon biome was occupied by agricultural activities in 2022, equivalent to approximately 650,000 km2. Since 1988, the area occupied by pasture and crops has increased 4.6-fold.
An INPE study published in the journal Acta Amazônica in 2020 compared old maps of land use and cover in the Amazon biome created by TerraClass and MapBiomas. The key conclusion of the paper was that despite the methodological differences, between 87.4% and 92% of the results of the two initiatives were similar.
AMAZON+10 INITIATIVE
Land use is one of the key concerns of the Amazon+10 Initiative, alongside issues related to biodiversity, climate change, bioeconomy, biotechnology, and the living conditions of the residents of Amazonia. Launched in July last year, the program is run by Brazil’s National Council of State Research Funding Agencies (CONFAP) and National Council of Science, Technology, and Innovation Departments (CONSECTI). It also has a partnership with the Brazilian National Council for Scientific and Technological Development (CNPq).
At the end of last year, 39 research proposals were accepted from 19 Brazilian states. The Association of State Research Funding Agencies (FAP) allocated R$41.9 million to the projects chosen after the program's first call. In November of that year, Amazon+10 issued a second call for proposals, with a planned budget of R$59.2 million and a focus on funding scientific expeditions to the region. n 2
Cattle in front of a burned forest area in Novo Progresso, Pará, August 2019
São Luís
THE FRONTIER POET
The president of Brazil’s National Library, fluent in 22 languages, translates work from languages such as Persian, Russian, and Turkish
Christina Queiroz PORTRAIT Ana Carolina Fernandes
Professor of comparative literature at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ), poet, writer, memoirist, and essayist: Marco Americo Lucchesi, born in Rio de Janeiro, was appointed president of Brazil’s National Library Foundation (FBN) in 2023 with the mission of making the institution more transparent and accessible, in addition to modernizing its century-old collection, comprising more than 10 million items. The task includes incorporating a sensitive look at identity issues in texts written in colonial times, expanding the physical space available to store the collections, and expanding access to digitized documents.
Lucchesi is fluent in 22 languages, including Persian, Latin, Arabic, and Russian. His first contact with literature came at an early age—as a child he would listen to his father and grandmother reciting verses by Italian poets such as Dante Alighieri (1265–1321). The history graduate has traveled the world and headed the Brazilian Academy of Letters (ABL) from 2018 to 2021. He has translated the work of authors such as Italian writers Umberto Eco (1932–2016) and Primo Levi (1919–1987), Persian poet Yalāl ad-Dīn Muhammad Rūmī (1207–1273), and Pakistani writer Muhammad Iqbal (1877–1938).
In an interview given to Pesquisa FAPESP from the top floor of the National Library in Rio de Janeiro, Lucchesi refused formalities and asked to be called Marco. Smiling and expressive, he spoke of his plans as head of the second oldest institution in Brazil and reflected on the importance of literature and history research to the process of translating authors into Portuguese.
AGE 59
FIELD OF EXPERTISE
Comparative literature and translation
INSTITUTION
Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ)
EDUCATIONAL BACKGROUND
Bachelor’s degree in history from UFF (1985), master’s degree and PhD in literature from UFRJ (1989 and 1992, respectively)
Is your first language Italian or Portuguese?
My childhood was bilingual. At home, it was as if I lived in a little Italy—the language of my early years was Italian. Within my family, we didn’t speak Portuguese because it would have been artificial. I grew up on the horizons of Brazil. At school, with friends, and on the street, I always spoke Portuguese. The experience of growing up bilingual is different from learning other languages later on. Having two languages as part of my educational world was a remarkable experience.
Why did your parents immigrate to Brazil?
My parents, Elena Dati and Egidio Lucchesi, came to Brazil at the invitation of the journalist and businessman Assis Chateaubriand [1892–1968]. My father was a radio and television antenna engineer. He was extremely talented in his craft: he invented different systems and won prizes. He met Chateaubriand while working as a radio operator on an Italian merchant navy boat. In the 1950s, he was invited to work on the businessman’s radio system. He was already engaged to my mother at the time, so they married by proxy. Some years later, my maternal grandmother arrived in Rio de Janeiro. They never felt like foreigners here, despite it being another world compared to their hometown of Massarosa, a small town in northern Tuscany. For them, Brazil was a land of dreams, of peace and dialog, even with all the contradictions. I was born in Copacabana, Rio de Janeiro, in 1963. I don’t have any siblings, and I don’t have any children.
Do you remember your first contact with literature?
My first contact was through music, oral experiences, and encyclopedias. My mother sang, played the piano—an instrument that later became mine—and knew many lullabies. My father loved Dante Alighieri. He could recite excerpts from the narrative poem Divine Comedy by heart. In fact, when he later developed Alzheimer’s disease, the only way of communicating with him was to recite half a verse of Dante, and he would complete it. Dante was our link. My maternal grandmother narrated the stories of Orlando Furioso, an epic poem by
Ludovico Ariosto [1474–1533]. I also remember the first time I went to a bookstore on my own and bought a book. It was in 1972—I was eight years old. I bought Poemas [Poems] by Gonçalves Dias [1823–1864] from a bookstore in Niterói. It was a 1968 edition edited by critic Péricles Eugênio da Silva Ramos [1919–1992]. I still have it to this day, and sometimes I reread the sentimental notes I made when I was eight years old. In 2023, I experienced an exciting moment related to this renowned poet. The Judicial Archive of the Maranhão State Court discovered copies of Dias’s court records, which were hitherto unknown, and donated them to the National Library. In addition to being a poet, he was also a lawyer. The library is cataloging the material, and it will soon be available for research.
Were you close to writers from a young age?
I met Carlos Drummond de Andrade [1902–1987] in person at the age of 21, at the 80th birthday party of the jurist and writer Afonso Arinos de Melo Franco [1905–1990]. It was an unforgettable
and emotional experience. Previously, I had been exchanging letters with Drummond. Another memorable meeting was held with the Egyptian writer Naguib Mahfouz [1911–2006] when I was 33 years old on a trip to Egypt in 1996. He had been injured by the extremist Islamic group the Muslim Brotherhood and was staying secluded in his home, but he agreed to let me visit. I asked him a lot of questions, and we talked for hours. But there were many other meetings, before and after these.
Is it true that you speak 22 languages? Yes, it’s true, but I also have a hard time believing it. Deep down, I think it’s a psychiatric problem. Jokes aside, to this day I ask myself: why so many languages? It’s over the top—it’s almost audacious. But sensitivity to languages already existed in my family, especially in my paternal grandfather, who I never knew. He wasn’t Jewish, but his family says he was taken to the Mauthausen-Gusen concentration camp in Austria during World War II [1939–1945]. He was able to quickly learn German and ran away. He knew how to speak five or six languages, but I don’t know how he learned them. I also think that I was influenced by exposure to the radio, which I had since I was little and which sparked a desire to communicate with other people.
When my father developed Alzheimer’s disease, the only way of communicating with him was to recite a verse of Dante
How did you learn so many languages? I learned Spanish and English as a young child. At 12, I learned German and French, and at 14, Russian. The other languages I studied later, like Arabic, which I learned when I was 30. Arabic helped me while I was traveling to various countries, such as Lebanon, Syria, Egypt, and Morocco, each with their specific variants of the language. In the beginning, I always take classes with teachers and use standard learning methods. For complex languages like Arabic, travel also helps a lot. And as if this obsession with learning languages wasn’t enough, I invented one of my own, which I called Laputar, and I even published a grammar with bilingual text, preface, and glossary. Nowadays, I don’t study as many languages as I used to, and I have been focusing solely on learning Nheengatu, in addition to writing. Nheengatu, also known as Modern Tupi, is an indigenous language spoken by the Tupi-Guarani family.
How did you go from studying history to the field of literature?
I studied history at Fluminense Federal University [UFF] in the 1980s, when the institution was still developing its master’s and PhD programs. I was passionate about the subject and authors who wrote about chronotopy, which is the way temporal and spatial relationships are represented in artistic work. I already considered literature a fundamental space for achieving my goals, which were to write poetry, essays, novels, and memoirs. After graduating, I chose to study comparative literature, its historical contexts, theoretical frameworks, and methodological references. I obtained my master’s and PhD at UFRJ, and my PhD was on Dante. My thesis was published in a book titled Nove cartas sobre a Divina comédia [Nine letters about the Divine Comedy; Bazar do Tempo, 2013]. Each chapter is a different letter addressed to the reader, each reflecting on different themes and aspects of the Divine Comedy, from hell to paradise. I completed a postdoctorate at the Uni-
versity of Cologne, Germany, in 1994, in which I studied the philosophy of the Italian Renaissance, especially the work of the Neoplatonic scholar Marsílio Ficino [1433–1499], who was a philologist, doctor, and philosopher.
Can you tell us about your research interests?
I study the literary systems of different countries, including Italy, Iran, Turkey, Greece, and Russia. A literary system is a concept that encompasses all the elements that comprise the literary situation of a given location, such as tradition, movements, publishers, associations, and other aspects. In my research, I try to understand the relationships between history and literature and the translation processes of different authors. I have examined these interactions in various projects, such as a study on the borders between fiction and essay, history and literature, based on the work of contemporary Italian writer Claudio Magris. I also investigate the ethical dimensions of translation through analyses of se-
mantic and cultural changes that occur when a text is changed from the source language to the target language.
How do your translation work and research feed into each other?
This is one of the central questions of the research I was doing, funded by the Brazilian National Council for Scientific and Technological Development [CNPq], before I became president of the National Library. The work of a translator is artisanal in a way, word by word, but it has to be balanced with knowledge about the history and literature of the countries in question, and semantic meanings have to be adjusted according to the context. The translation process does not happen solely through relationships between languages—it requires prior knowledge of literary systems. In other words, translation is a field in which historical and literary aspects need to be combined symphonically. Theoretical knowledge has to be aligned with practical knowledge of what works in terms of rhymes and metrics. Theory and practice need to be self-correcting and to provide constant feedback. This is a major challenge, especially when it comes to translating poems. These proposals guided my translations of authors such as the Romanian poet and mathematician Dan Barbilian [1895–1961]; the German poet, theologian, and physician Angelus Silesius [1624–1677]; and the Russian poet Velimir Khliébnikov [1885–1922].
Why is translating poetry so challenging?
Poetry can make great leaps, uniting apparently disparate elements and merging things that seem far apart, offering a spark for understanding the meaning. Thus, from the impossibility of dialog, the poet creates a means to break through barriers to cross borders, and this intention needs to be present in the work of recreating each verse. The translator may feel worried or distressed by the notion that it is only possible to verge on the meanings of the original literary text and that the task is imponderable and imprecise by nature.
What was the most difficult text you translated?
I started translating when I was 15 and I continue to this day. This year, for exam-
Lucchesi showing a very rare text produced by a Franciscan friar between 1445 and 1517
ple, I did two demanding translations: Babel [Attar Editorial], by the contemporary Turkish poet Tozan Alkan, and Caderno azul [Blue notebook; Editora Patuá], by Yunus Emre [1238–1328], which I translated from Old Turkic. Both involved a great deal of work, since they required not only knowledge of the language, its rhymes and metrics but also the recreation of the Turkish literary system, both ancient and modern, for the Brazilian literary system. This means I had to mobilize my knowledge of the history of both countries and theoretical references of translation philosophy.
Where does your interest in and relationship with authors from the Middle East stem from?
In my 30s, 40s, and 50s, I felt a kind of great longing for the Middle East, a feeling that stuck with me for decades. I traveled to many places, almost all Arab countries – Mauritania, Morocco, Saudi Arabia, and several others– sometimes due to invitations to give lectures or launch books, and sometimes on vacation. In 2022, I went to Pakistan to give a lecture. I wanted to place flowers at the tomb of the poet and philosopher Muhammad Iqbal, but I couldn’t because there were rumors of a coup d’état. I had to flee the hotel at 4 a.m., making a dash for the airport escorted by security guards armed to the teeth.
Has knowing how to speak so many languages opened doors for you beyond the field of translation?
I like to use the languages I know to open spaces for dialog. I’ll give you an example: in 1996, I was in Lebanon, and I wanted to visit a refugee camp. I arrived in Sabra and Shatila, and an Arab journalist greeted me in English. I promptly responded in Arabic. He was surprised and delighted, and I was thus able to visit the camp accompanied by children, elderly people, and women. It was a different experience, which showed me how dramatic life is in these places. I also participated in a group that lobbied Brazil’s National Council of Justice in defense of the right to read in prisons. Before the pandemic, I used to visit prisons to teach at the schools that operate there. In one of them, I started talking to a man who spoke Portuguese in a way that was difficult to understand. I asked
him where he was from, but he didn’t respond. It was actually an inappropriate question, as it seemed to make him feel even more excluded: he was imprisoned, and on top of that, he was a foreigner. To try to alleviate the situation, I told him that my origins were Italian and he eventually responded that he was from Brasov, Romania. So I said in Romanian: “Brasov, Romania? But how can that be, my friend?” He was surprised that I spoke his mother tongue. At the end of our conversation, he hugged me and kissed me on the face.
Based on your experience in different nations and social situations, what advice would you give young researchers wishing to enter academic life?
One of the most important things is to avoid the temptation to pursue a career just out of vanity or for the stability provided by public service. Young people
need to be wary of this siren song. Big metaphysical questions need to be in the foreground at all times. The second fundamental point is the ability to make diverse and global interpretations without prejudice, in a methodical fashion, without rushing. Keep an open, broad outlook and avoid fads. Be careful with mechanical ideologies, anachronisms, and historicist illusions, and make sure to look at the past without confinement. We need to distrust the present and face the challenges of the future. Do not, under any circumstances, allow the institution to destroy or compromise our subjectivity. This is a constant, perennial struggle of self-regulation and refinement. The big insights relate to the structure of scientific revolutions that occur in the collective, in clashes and in dialog, but the solid core of subjectivity must govern all research and academic interests.
Shall we talk about the National Library? Can you tell us exactly what the institution is?
Why speak so many languages? It’s over the top. Sensitivity to languages already existed in my family
The National Library is a great feat, a waking dream, a box of treasures, a time machine, and a bastion of infinity. To give you an objective definition, a national library is a library that, by law, serves as an archive for everything published in the country, be it books, magazines, newspapers, or sheet music. Brazil receives up to 80,000 to 100,000 books per year and has to catalog and preserve all of it. During the holidays, we receive 7,000 visitors per day. Our website is expected to exceed 100 million hits this year. We also work in partnership with libraries across Latin America through the International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions. Brazil’s National Library is globally recognized for its preservation and conservation work, and we provide assistance to institutions in Bolivia, Ecuador, Uruguay, and Paraguay. We seek to develop collaborations with others on this continent who have a lot to give to the world. We also just held our first meeting with national libraries from Portuguese-speaking African countries.
What secrets does the National Library hide? Are there any closed boxes that have never been opened? No. What certainly must exist are sur-
prises related to classification, meaning objects that were cataloged wrongly. In 2011, an unknown edition of the book Cosmic Harmony [1596] by the German astronomer and mathematician Johannes Kepler [1571–1630] was found. When I heard the news, I fell to my knees. In the 1950s, nineteenthcentury reports by Machado de Assis [1839–1908] for the Dramatic Conservatory were found in which the writer assessed whether certain plays should be performed. In other words, many surprises can be unearthed by the work of researchers and librarians.
Do you remember the first time you went to the National Library? It must have been when I was 14 or 15. I have always been enchanted by this institution. There are so many treasures. Some Egyptologists recently visited and were very impressed by the photos that Dom Pedro II brought from Egypt. We have the largest collection of incunabula—books printed in the fifteenth century, before the Gutenberg press—South of the Equator. We have the Bible of Mainz, printed in 1462, as well as works by Candido Portinari [1903–1962], etchings by Francisco Goya [1746–1828], and a music collection that is considered the most important in Latin America. One of the library’s greatest jewels is Divina proportione, a very rare book produced by the Franciscan friar and mathematician Luca Bartolomeo de Pacioli [1445–1517]. The book describes the divine proportion [also known as the golden ratio] from a Platonic perspective, arguing that mathematics and geometry are the true languages of the Universe. The book was illustrated by Leonardo da Vinci [1452–1519], who was Pacioli’s student. It was found damaged and spoiled. Some of the book was crumbling away, but the National Library’s preservation team managed to recover it as part of a project to reconstruct rare books. I have immense respect for the employees of this institution.
What are the challenges for a centuryold institution looking to modernize while also preserving the past? Every generation opens the window of their own time and harvests the best fruits. They all complement and review a collection development policy. The
The translator needs to deal with the notion that it is only possible to verge on the meaning of the original literary text
The National Library has faced problems related to poor structural maintenance, which has caused water leaks, refrigeration system failures, and an increased fire risk. Are these issues being resolved?
Ten years ago, the institution began work on modernizing its refrigeration system, and in 2017, the facade was renovated. Over the past five years, money has been invested in fire safety improvements, including investments in architecture and employee training. There are still problems related to a lack of space and the reduced number of staff. The library is continuously growing, and the physical space needs to keep up with this progress. This year, we received R$23 million from the federal government and R$18 million from the Diffuse Rights Fund to begin renovations of the library’s annex in Porto Maravilha, central Rio de Janeiro. Based on these and other investments, the idea is for the annex to function as a twenty-first-century library. Funding is being increased in an attempt to improve these problems, but we have to take a cautious approach, be transparent in our spending, and respond to regulatory agencies. As a result, many projects are not put into practice as quickly as we might like.
challenge of our time is to expand bibliodiversity. In partnership with indigenous leaders, we are going to rethink a collection of photographs taken by various professionals in a Yanomami village near São Gabriel da Cachoeira [Amazonas]. This year, we launched the Akuli Award as a way of recognizing ancestral songs and oral narratives from traditional, quilombola, and riverside peoples as part of our annual literary awards. I had the idea for the award while visiting quilombola villages and communities around the country. I saw that new generations wish to rebuild the social fabric based on oral narratives and songs. The Akuli Award was a first step in our efforts to expand the National Library’s ethnic inventory without compromising its other riches. We are all-inclusive. The library is an institution that does not censor; it is democratic and stores an enormous plurality of books and voices.
What is a twenty-first-century library? It is an institution without walls— transparent and accessible. We are making efforts to digitize more of the collection. Our database currently gets eight million hits per month, and we want to increase the number of digitized documents so that researchers from all over the world can consult them. There must be no confusion: digital is not the enemy of analog, as many people thought in the 1990s. It doubles the preservation work and means we need to maintain two forms of heritage, in terms of their organization, but we must expand access to information. We must ensure that the National Library is not just a repository but also a great crossroads of knowledge. Finally, we face the challenge of performing more research so that we can deepen our understanding of the items in our collection that have yet to be studied in depth, including the comics repository, one of the largest in the world. n
EXPANDING OPPORTUNITIES
The FAPESP Annual Report shows that the foundation increased its research funding in 2022 and sought to recover from losses caused by the pandemic
Fabrício Marques
The S ão Paulo Research Foundation invested R$1,182,639,805 in 20,709 research projects in 2022. This total amount was 16.7% higher than that in 2021, and the number of projects funded increased by 27.8%. The foundation's income totaled R$2,214,740,885 in 2022, 24% above the previous year; there was a 12.6% increase in contributions from the São Paulo State Treasury, reaching R$1,907,892,438, and a 235% increase from other sources, which amounted to R$306,848,447. The precise balance is described in the FAPESP Annual Report 2022, which is available on the foundation's website, where annual funding data since 1962—when FAPESP began operating—are also available.
The foundation's income comes from 1% of the state of São Paulo’s tax revenue, which is transferred monthly by the treasury as outlined in the São Paulo State Constitution, in addition to contributions from other sources, such as joint research investment agreements with institutions and companies. One of the highlights of 2022 was the investment in research for the advancement of knowledge—this category includes large-scale basic and applied research projects, such as thematic projects, Young Investigator Awards at emerging research institutions, and Research, Innovation, and Dissemination Centers (RIDCs)—which represented 53.5% of the foundation's disbursements. Funding in this area grew from R$563.6 million in 2021 to R$633 million in 2022. “This is the result of FAPESP’s efforts to expand funding opportunities for young researchers through initiatives such as the Generation Project and Initial Project, or by increasing the duration of Young Investigator awards from 48 to 60 months, in addition to agreeing to 54 new thematic projects in the period,” explained Marco Antonio Zago, president of the foundation’s board of trustees, when presenting the report.
Investment in all fellowship types grew by more than 20% over the course of 2021, and the training of scientists and
researchers accounted for 18% of all FAPESP funding. The R$130 million invested in the research infrastructure support category accounted for 11% of all funding, which was one percentage point above that accounted for in 2021. This increase was due to the three calls for proposals issued in 2022 for the acquisition of large, multiuser equipment, with expected investments of R$450 million. In September 2023, another call was issued for the acquisition of small equipment, with expected investments of R$200 million.
On other aspects, funding remained stable. This was the case with investments in research for innovation, which includes programs such as the Research Partnership for Technological Innovation (PITE) program, the Innovative Research in Small Businesses (PIPE) program, and Engineering Research Centers/Applied Research Centers (CPE/CPAs), which account for 8.5% of the total, in addition to funding through the Research on Strategic Themes program, which covers topics such as biodiversity, bioenergy, and climate change (7%), and disbursement in research communication, identification, and assessment (2%).
While the increase in funding reflects the country’s postpandemic recovery, some remnants of the global crisis, which led to the temporary closure of laboratories and a reduction in in-person activities at research institutes and universities, are still present in other indicators. Scientific output by researchers in the state of São Paulo fell from 30,600 articles published in 2021 to 25,100 in 2022; however, since the same decline was recorded across Brazil, the state maintained its proportion of the national total at 41.9%. There was also a decrease of approximately 40% in the number of new research proposals submitted to the foundation compared to that before the arrival of COVID-19.
To compensate for the reduction in spontaneous demands for funding, several initiatives have sought to increase investment in medium- and long-term projects, with the aim of stimulating the state's research and innovation sector. FAPESP
FUNDING BY CATEGORY
A total of 53.5% of the research focused on the advancement of knowledge (both basic and applied)
18% Training scientists and researchers
11% Research infrastructure
8.5% Research for innovation
7% Research on strategic themes
2% Research communication, identification, and assessment
FUNDING BY FIELD
& statistics
& space science
Architecture & urban planning
Economics & administration
FAPESP invested a total of R$ 1,182,639,805 in 20,709 research projects in 2022
announced in 2022 the results of a call for another 17 new Science for Development Centers (CCDs) to supplement the 11 that already exist, which have the purpose of linking scientists from different state research institutes and universities with managers at public agencies through projects that aim to solve specific problems with social or economic relevance in São Paulo. “We have huge problems in various state departments, and this is a way for us to listen to public managers, align research topics, and issue calls for proposals that address the problems these departments are facing in managing public policies,” explained Carlos Américo Pacheco, president of FAPESP’s executive board, when announcing the chosen proposals. The new centers will carry out research on topics such as biopharmaceuticals, innovation in urban public policy, technological innovation for health emergencies, human and animal diseases, and vaccine improvement.
INVESTMENT BY INSTITUTION
How FAPESP funding was distributed in 2022
In 2022, three new CPE/CPAs opened for operations. The first is headquartered at the University of São Paulo (USP) and focuses on offshore innovations in partnership with Shell; the second is headquartered at the University of Campinas (UNICAMP) and focuses on improving molecular plants together with the Brazilian Agricultural Research Corporation (EMBRAPA); and the third is headquartered at the Sociedade Beneficente Israelita Albert Einstein and studies immuno-oncology in cooperation with GSK. The latter is the third center that has been established jointly by FAPESP and GSK. One of the other two centers has been functioning at the Butantan Institute since 2015, with the aim of investigating molecular targets for the treatment of inflammatory diseases. The other, which is based at the Federal University of São Carlos (UFSCar), focuses on the development of sustainable chemical products and processes for new medicines.
In CPEs, companies establish long-term collaborations with scientists from universities or research institutes that last for periods of approximately five to 10 years. Such research is cofunded equally by FAPESP and the partner company, while the institutions contribute through the provision of infrastructure and the payment of salaries to researchers and technicians. “For every R$10 that FAPESP puts into one of these centers, the company puts in another R$10 or more to amplify the results of the investment,” explains neuroscientist Luiz Eugênio Mello, who was the scientific director of FAPESP in 2022 (see Pesquisa FAPESP issue no. 327). “In sectors where research and development resources are incentivized—in the oil and gas industry, for example—we do not do one-to-one partnerships, but two-to-one, three-to-one, or four-to-one partnerships. And this money always goes to a science and technology institution in the state of São Paulo, to be used for reagents, equipment, or scholarships.” Another three CPEs were created in 2022, with research set to begin in 2023. The Smartness CPE, which will conduct research into networks and services, will be based on UNICAMP and in partnership with Ericsson. The Engineering Research Center for Future Air Mobility (CPE-MAF) will bring together researchers from EMBRAER and the Aeronautics Technological Institute (ITA). The Braskem CPE will involve a partnership between UNICAMP and other institutions, with the aim of studying the use of plasticulture in agriculture.
ARTICLES ABOUT COVID-19
Papers related to the novel coronavirus published by researchers from São Paulo
THE GEOGRAPHY OF INNOVATION
Locations of companies funded by the PIPE program since 1997 by administrative region
The PIPE program, which has invested in research at 1,853 micro, small, and medium-sized technology companies in 163 municipalities of São Paulo since 1997, agreed to fund 578 new projects at 224 innovative companies in 2022. Some of the projects were selected through calls issued in partnership with the São Paulo State Sanitation Company (SABESP), the Brazilian Support Service for Micro and Small Businesses (SEBRAE), and the Brazilian Funding Authority for Studies and Projects (FINEP). For the first time, FAPESP took part in the Centelha Program, which is an initiative run jointly by the Ministry of Science, Technology, and Innovation (MCTI) and FINEP, in partnership with the National Council of State Research Funding Agencies (CONFAP) and the Florianópolisbased CERTI Foundation (which stands for Reference Center for Innovative Technologies in Portuguese). The objective of the program is to support young entrepreneurs who are interested in transforming innovative ideas into new businesses.
The foundation was also responsible for the national coordination of the Amazônia +10 Initiative, which is a partnership involving state research funding agencies (FAPs) under the leadership of CONFAP, which aims to stimulate collaborative and interdisciplinary research, with a focus on sustainable development of the Amazon. The first call for proposals received applications from more than 500 scientists from 20 Brazilian states. Thirty-nine proposals were selected from 18 states and the Federal District, with a total of R$41.9 million invested by FAPs.
In May 2022, at a ceremony marking FAPESP’s 60 th anniversary, the foundation announced new research investments totaling R$990 million. The celebrations officially began in 2021 with seventeen FAPESP 60 Years Conferences, two FAPESP 60 Years Schools offering 120 postdoctoral fellowships to researchers across Brazil, and two books being announced for released in 2022, namely, FAPESP 60 anos: Ciência, cultura e desenvolvimento (FAPESP 60 years: Science, culture, and development) and FAPESP 60 anos: A ciência no desenvolvimento nacional (FAPESP 60 years: Science in national development), both of which were edited by the São Paulo State Science Academy (ACIESP). n
TRAINING SCIENTISTS AND RESEARCHERS
Number of FAPESP-funded fellowships undertaken in 2022
Undergraduate Master's PhD Direct PhD Postdoctorate
Research fellowships abroad (BPE) FELLOWSHIPS IN BRAZIL
Research internships abroad (BEPE)
BEPE – Undergraduate
BEPE – Master’s
BEPE – PhD
BEPE – Direct PhD
BEPE – Postdoctorate
BPE – Postdoctorate
women, with 55 and 54 articles, respectively. “A big mark of sexism in science is that women’s health became a field of study considered scientific when it began being researched by men. Female culture and wisdom about their own health was were ignored,” affirms Hoppen. According to her, gender inequalities are evident in scientometrics, the field that analyzes quantitative aspects of science. “In most fields of knowledge, men are able to can publish more than women and appear to find it easier to publish their research results and do more collaborations. This also appears in the ranking of researchers who publish the most— which corroborates the need for affirmative actions for women in science,” she affirms.
SCIENTIFIC DIFFUSION
COMMUNICATION BARRIER
Study outlines the disadvantages faced by authors of scientific articles who do not speak English as a native language and ways to overcome them
Fabrício Marques
Ateam of researchers from 10 countries analyzed the publication policies of 736 biological science journals and identified barriers faced by authors who do not speak English as their native language. Some of these obstacles are well known. Because English is the lingua franca in science, journal editors commonly suggest that authors hire specialist services to edit or translate their scientific texts to ensure that the content of the manuscript is expressed clearly and follows the norms of the English language. Hiring such specialists increases the costs of publication, which most strongly affects authors from lowincome countries.
There are also less tangible barriers. Of the 736 journals analyzed, only two (Nature and Nature Plants ) categorically state in their guidelines that a paper will not be rejected solely because the authors have not expressed themselves satisfactorily in English—these journals indicated that the relevance and quality of the content was most important. In addition to analyzing publication rules, the group interviewed the editorsin-chief of 262 journals and found that only 6% of them instructed reviewers not to immediately reject articles in English with grammar, clarity, or fluidity problems. Approximately half of the editors suggested that authors use free online English editing services to correct grammar or referred them to online tutorials. Only 1% of the
journals offered assistance through free mentoring programs. This study, which was shared on the EcoEvoRxiv preprint server and not yet peer-reviewed, was the first to highlight examples of journals that support researchers whose manuscripts require language improvements. Journals published by scientific societies tend to be more inclusive in this regard. The U.S.-based Society for the Study of Evolution has an English mentoring program to support authors who submit papers to its journal, Evolution. For no fee, authors can request that editors with experience in scientific writing suggest small changes and talk to them directly about ways of making their manuscript clearer. They can ask for support before submitting the article or during the review process.
Another example is the Journal of Field Ornithology, linked to the Association of Field Ornithologists, an American scientific organization that connects authors who do not speak English as their first language with volunteers who can help them improve their papers. The American Society of Mammalogists has created a free partnership scheme called the ASM Buddy System, through which zoologists help improve the English level of manuscripts, while the British Ecological Society’s Journal of Ecology offers a free AI proofreading service called Writefull. The support for the authors is well received. Germana Barata, a researcher from the Laboratory for Advanced Journalism Studies at the University
of Campinas (UNICAMP), told Nature about her positive experience publishing in English in the journal Cultures of Science. “The corrections and edits did not change my ideas, the essence of what I write, or the style at all,” she says. “That is not true with many other titles.” The article makes a series of recommendations to address language barriers, such as a public commitment by journals to fairly evaluate the content of all papers, including those with language problems, or free services to make articles describing important findings more readable in English.
“Our research concluded that journals can fulfill a dual role. Although they are a source of language barriers, they can also help authors to overcome them,” said Brazilian biologist and coauthor of the article, Pedro Albuquerque Sena, technical coordinator of the Northeast Environmental Research Center (CEPAN), a private research institution based in Recife. Sena is part of a community of ecologists on X (formerly known as Twitter) that shares and discusses embarrassing situations suffered by scientists from developing countries when submitting their papers to high-impact journals. Complaints often relate to linguistic errors but also to feelings of injustice and discrimination in the process through which reviewers disqualify studies as poorly written in English or unoriginal. Sena found an invitation
on the social network for researchers interested in surveying and analyzing the publication policies of ecology journals and decided to join the project, together with colleagues from countries such as Australia, the UK, the USA, Indonesia, and the Czech Republic.
The team was assembled by the study's lead author, Tatsuya Amano, a Japanese biologist from the Center for Biodiversity and Conservation Science at the University of Queensland in Brisbane, Australia. Amano is interested in the topic of linguistic bias because he feels affected by it himself. He left Japan in 2011 to work in the UK and then in Australia, where he was challenged to produce science exclusively in English. Even today, he says he has difficulty writing articles, preparing lectures, and, in particular, giving presentations at conferences in English. “It takes me a lot of time and effort to do everything in English,” he told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation in an interview. “Language barriers create anxiety, discomfort, embarrassment. You need to be really brave.”
In another article published in the journal PLOS Biology in July, Amano and colleagues interviewed 908 environmental science researchers. Those whose native language was not English took up to twice as long as native speakers to write articles or prepare presentations in English. Their work was also 2.5 times more likely to be rejected by journals, and the likelihood of being asked to make revisions before publication was 12.5 times greater. Due to a lack of confidence in communicating in English, one-third of the participants said they had stopped attending international conferences—of those who continue to go, half said they had avoided giving oral presentations.
Environmental science researchers whose first language is not English took twice as long as native English speakers to prepare work in the language
The damage is not limited to the mental health of the scientists. Amano’s primary research activity aims to improve conservation strategies by finding data to fill gaps in biodiversity knowledge. He points out that this knowledge is produced in many different languages and that current publishing practices restrict its communication. “The planet needs input from all scientists, no matter what their fluency in English,” he says.
Sigmar de Mello Rode of São Paulo State University (UNESP), president of the Brazilian Association of Science Editors (ABEC Brasil), says that in recent years, Brazil’s scientists and journals have been challenged to publish increasingly in English and have had to create strategies to address linguistic difficulties. “Whether we like it or not, English has become the language of science, and scientific results have to be disseminated in the language. If the target audience of a study
Brazilian journals that publish in English ask authors to send their articles to specialist review services that provide certificates guaranteeing linguistic quality
is in Brazil and Latin America, the solution has been to also publish versions in Portuguese and Spanish,” he explains.
He says that scientific journals in Brazil have adopted similar strategies to international journals to ensure the linguistic quality of their content. “Many titles ask authors to send their articles to specialist English proofreading services that provide certificates confirming the text is well written,” he explains. Some even recommend specific companies, such as Enago, which charges upwards of US$90 to correct the grammar and style of a 1,500-word text. Publishers such as Springer Nature offer their own services. A 1,500-word article costs US$243 for the Silver service, which involves a review by an editor who specializes in the manuscript's topic and includes a certificate; the Gold service costs US$484, which includes adaptations to give the text a more professional and natural style.
Rode says that in his experience as a researcher, he saw signs of prejudice toward science produced in developing countries through criticisms of the level of English in the manuscripts. A few years ago, he carried out a test: he wrote an article in English and had it reviewed by a professional service before submitting it to an international journal. He deliberately did not attach the revision certificate. “The article was returned immediately with a warning that there were issues with clarity and grammar and that it needed a review.
I contacted the editor to tell him that the manuscript had been revised. I sent him the certificate and asked him to point out the problems he had found so that I could speak to the company and ask for my US$120 back. The editor apologized, saying he had made a mistake and that a revision was not really necessary,” he says.
Brazilian biologist Marcia Triunfol, a former Science editor who specializes in scientific writing, sees a degree of exaggeration in the way English proficiency is demanded of Brazilian authors. “Once, in a workshop I organized in São Paulo, an American scientist said that until Brazilians learned the difference between show and demonstrate, they would not be able to write good articles in English. I was shocked, because I do not see how this relates to the quality of an article in any way,” says the biologist, who is also the founder of Publicase, a company that started in 2007 to offer article translation and review services, as well as scientific writing workshops and training courses for researchers and students. She currently lives in Portugal and says she does not see the same demands or concerns in regard to European authors for whom English is a second language.
Triunfol believes that the most complex challenge is not increasing English proficiency, which has been improving in recent years, but training students and young scientists in scientific writing. “During the pandemic, we held virtual training sessions via Zoom for postdoctoral fellows at Harvard University. The questions they had about how to write a scientific article were the same as those raised in workshops for Brazilian scientists.” According to her, the training offered by universities is often improvised. “Ideally, there would be professors who specialize in science communication techniques and not just researchers sharing their experiences with students.”
Triunfol believes that the problem will be less severe in the near future. In her opinion, AI-based translation and editing tools could play a central role in adjusting the writing of non-Englishspeaking scientists. “In recent years, with the introduction of translation software, I have seen an improvement in the quality of scientific writing. More recently, because of ChatGPT, I noticed a drop in demand for translation and proofreading services from my company, which I consider positive.” The publisher says it is possible to use AI to correct scientific writing in an ethical way. “Since the objective is to correct and improve a text already written by the researcher themself, there is no real danger of these tools leading to plagiarism,” she states. n
A POTENTIAL VACCINE AGAINST COCAINE ADDICTION
Research to develop an immunizing agent for treating addiction to cocaine is underway
Suzel Tunes
Addiction to cocaine, including its derivatives such as crack, remains a global public health concern for which the medical community has yet to find an effective treatment. A team of researchers at the Federal University of Minas Gerais (UFMG) is turning to immunology to find a solution. The group is developing a novel vaccine against cocaine addiction and is currently seeking funding for its first human trials. Initial experiments on animals have demonstrated the ability of the vaccine to stimulate the production of anti-cocaine antibodies, but scientific evidence confirming its effectiveness in reducing drug dependency has yet to be obtained. The researchers plan to conduct further testing in animals before proceeding to clinical trials involving human volunteers on a to-be-determined date.
“In testing on rodents and nonhuman primates—specifically of the species Callithrix penicillata—our vaccine, called Calixcoca, produced no significant side effects. We only observed a mild reaction at the injection site, which did not affect the overall health of the animals,” says Frederico Duarte Garcia, a professor in the Mental Health Department at the UFMG School of Medicine and the lead author of the study.
The name Calixcoca, he says, is inspired by the chemical structure of the immunizing agent, known as calixarene, so named because it resembles a chalice. This molecule serves as the carrier for the antigen, a hapten that is an analog of cocaine—carriers are high-molecular-weight substances that are capable of eliciting an immune response.
Pharmacist Paulo Sérgio de Almeida Augusto, a member of the UFMG research group, explained that haptens are tiny molecules that, due to their diminutive size, are typically not recognized by the immune system as invaders; therefore, haptens need to be combined with larger carrier macromolecules to prompt an immune response within the body. This is the case with cocaine. Augusto explains, “Cocaine represents a foreign molecule within the human body. However, it often lacks the molecular weight and chemical complexity required to elicit a substantial immune response. Although such a response may occur in individuals who frequently use high doses of the drug, it does not occur in every individual.”
The researchers developed their immunizing agent by deriving a hapten from a cocaine molecule specifically modified to bind to the carrier. When coupled with calixarene, the derived hapten has a higher molecular weight and is able to elicit an immune response. If a vaccinated individual uses cocaine or crack, the antibodies will bind to the drug molecules in the bloodstream, preventing—or at least reducing—their passage through the blood–brain barrier. This barrier lines the blood vessels that vascularize the central nervous system, acting as a selective gatekeeper that controls the transport of substances into the brain.
In mice administered with the synthesized molecule, radiochemical assays conducted by UFMG researchers showed that the vaccine successfully reduced drug transport across the blood-brain barrier. “Immunized animals were treated with a radiolabeled analog of cocaine. Immunosorbent assays showed a lower concentration of this compound in the brain and a higher concentration in the bloodstream compared to those in animals that received only the placebo,” explains Augusto. The study results were published in the Journal of Advanced Research
The UFMG researchers hypothesize that if the vaccine is able to prevent cocaine molecules from crossing the blood-brain barrier, individuals will no longer experience the same pleasurable sensations that previously triggered the brain’s reward circuitry, driving compulsive behavior. This, however, has yet to be demonstrated in clinical trials. “Without the compulsion, patients have the opportunity to reclaim their family life, pursue their professional interests, and rediscover their other pleasures and interests that were once overshadowed by addiction,” explains Garcia.
LONG-STANDING CHALLENGES
The new therapeutic approach is viewed with guarded optimism by drug addiction experts. “The medical field has yet to develop an approved drug for fighting addiction. Current treatments primarily focus on managing the symptoms of withdrawal and related disorders, coupled with behavioral therapy,” explains Fábio Cardoso Cruz, a professor of biochemistry in the Department of Pharmacology at the Federal University of São Paulo (UNIFESP) who was not involved in the UFMG study.
Cocaine base: Cocaine is the second most consumed illicit substance in Brazil
Cruz is currently researching the neurobiological mechanisms underlying relapse to cocaine use in a FAPESP-funded project. His study aimed to answer the question of why 70% to 80% of individuals relapse during treatment. “This shows the urgent need to develop new therapeutic strategies. Vaccines are now emerging as a promising pharmacological approach,” he says.
Calixcoca is not the first immunology-based therapeutic formulation developed to treat substance dependence. “The therapeutic potential of vaccines against drug addiction was first demonstrated in the mid-1970s when a conjugate of morphine and bovine serum albumin was found to mildly reduce heroin self-administration in a rhesus monkey. The first papers describing attempts to develop vaccines against cocaine and nicotine addiction were published in the 1990s,”
HOW THE VACCINES WORK
says Cruz. The rhesus monkey experiment was published in Molecular Psychiatry in 1974.
Despite the promising results in preclinical trials and some early clinical trials, no antidrug vaccines have yet been approved. “Several hurdles remain on the path to clinical success. Notably, not all individuals respond uniformly to these vaccines, and in some individuals, the levels of antibodies necessary for achieving the desired clinical efficacy may not be produced,” says Cruz from UNIFESP.
“In general, vaccines are shown to be efficient in animal models. However, when they progress to the clinical trial phase, the results often fall short of expectations,” says Denise Morais da Fonseca, an immunologist affiliated with the Institute of Biomedical Sciences at the University of São Paulo (ICB-USP). In March, she collaborated
Vaccines for treating drug addiction typically consist of a hapten— a structurally modified drug molecule—conjugated to a carrier substance
1. The carrier, which has a larger molecular weight and is therefore capable of eliciting an immune response, is combined with an adjuvant that further enhances the body’s immune response
2. In the bloodstream, dendritic immune cells capture antigens and present them to helper T lymphocytes. This, in turn, stimulates B lymphocytes to produce antibodies that bind to the drug
3. Now bound to these antibodies, the drug molecules are unable to penetrate the blood brain barrier and activate brain receptors that regulate pleasure
Radiochemical assay images showing a lower concentration of a radiolabeled cocaine analog in the brains of rodents immunized with the UFMG vaccine (pink dots in the center of the image) than in those of rodents in the control group
Control group
Vaccinated animals
in developing an ICB course on pharmacological treatments for addiction. In preparation, she delved into the literature reviews concerning drug vaccines—obtaining rather disappointing results.
“A 2022 review documented 23 clinical trials involving antidrug vaccines, with six targeting cocaine addiction—most were focused on nicotine,” notes Fonseca. “Every single one of them failed.”
Some vaccines, she elaborates, failed to elicit a sufficient quantity of antibodies, or the immune response waned far too quickly. The precise reasons behind these results remain unclear, although they might be attributed to genetic variability among the individuals tested—a factor absent in animal models. “In most studies, researchers use isogenic mice, meaning they are genetically identical,” Fonseca explains.
Another possible explanation could lie in the behavior of the vaccine recipients themselves. “In some unsuccessful trials, individuals struggling with addiction consumed larger drug doses to achieve the desired effect,” she remarks.
The UFMG researchers recognize the theoretical risk of individuals attempting to overcome the effects of the vaccine by consuming larger doses of cocaine to reactivate the brain's reward circuitry. According to Augusto, this concern will be addressed in subsequent studies using experimental models that can estimate the quantity of the drug that the vaccine is capable of blocking.
“Our primary goal is to roadblock the compulsion mechanism,” Garcia notes. “Beyond a certain point, increased consumption would significantly increase the cost for the user, to a point where it becomes financially prohibitive.”
The UFMG group is confident that Calixcoca will outperform the other vaccine candidates in terms of efficacy. The researchers’ confidence stems from the unique chemical composition of
the vaccine. “The key distinction in our proposition is that the vaccine has no protein base. Calixarene is a synthetic organic substance,” says Ângelo de Fátima, a professor at the UFMG Department of Chemistry who developed the vaccine’s immunogenic platform.
Prior antidrug vaccine programs have relied on proteins as carriers, some of which have been used in other commercially available vaccines. This raised concerns about potential sensitization issues. “Patients reacted not only against the drug but also against these proteins. Our vaccine induces a better response because it introduces an entirely new molecule to the body,” Garcia says.
Another significant advantage of the new formulation, such as its developers, lies in its production process. “Calixarene is a more stable substance and doesn’t require a cold chain for production and storage. This makes the process more cost-effective,” Garcia explains. A cold chain refers to the logistics of handling, storing, distributing, and transporting temperature-sensitive medications.
Even if Calixcoca proves effective in generating antibodies against cocaine in humans in future clinical studies, additional therapeutic support will be needed, Cruz notes, drawing on his research into the biological mechanisms of addiction. He notes that patients’ associative memory related to drug use can be triggered by various cues, such as stress or exposure to environments and settings associated with drug use.
When a person has chronically used a particular substance, their brain associates the drug’s effects with the location where it was typically consumed, the objects used to consume it, the people around during consumption, and even the clothing worn during these occasions. Exposure to these elements can ignite an uncontrollable craving for the substance. “Vaccines can be used as part of an integrated approach combining behavioral therapy, psychosocial support, and other
interventions to assist individuals in overcoming addiction,” says Cruz.
“Antidrug vaccines need to be thought of as a component of broader public programs,” adds Fonseca from ICB-USP. She sees several ethical issues surrounding the use of vaccines. “Will we employ them as therapeutic or prophylactic vaccines? Will we screen high-risk groups for vaccination?” she asks. One potential use of the new pharmaceutical, according to Cruz, could be to protect expecting mothers and their infants from the harm caused by prenatal drug exposure. This is another facet of the UFMG group’s research and a subject of Paulo Augusto’s doctoral thesis in molecular medicine, which he defended in 2020.
Cruz notes that cocaine exposure during pregnancy poses risks not only to mothers, who may experience miscarriages or complications during delivery but also to fetuses and infants, with long-term implications throughout the lifetime. Prematurity, low birth weight, impaired neurobiological development, malformations, and an increased risk of developing psychiatric disorders in adolescence are among the deleterious effects associated with cocaine use during pregnancy.
“The best approach to prevent prenatal cocaine exposure is to cease consumption. However, only 25% of cocaine users manage to quit while pregnant,” notes Augusto.
His doctoral research served as a proof of concept for administering the anticocaine vaccine during pregnancy based on testing on pregnant rats. Published in Molecular Psychiatry in 2021, his paper describes the first study to report the efficacy of an immunizing agent during gestation. This project ran when Calixcoca was still being
developed, so Augusto chose to use a vaccine created by American researcher Kim Janda, known as GNE-KLH. This vaccine, based on the culmination of studies dating back to the 1990s, demonstrated promising results in preclinical testing but failed to yield the anticipated effects in clinical trials. However, in animal testing, the outcomes were positive. “Compared to mothers treated with a placebo, those vaccinated during pregnancy exhibited greater gestational weight gain and larger litters,” the researcher reports. “Anticocaine antibodies were detected in fetuses, newborns, and even breast milk.”
These antibodies also helped to mitigate the hyperactivity and hyperlocomotion effects induced by cocaine in newly weaned offspring. To validate this hypothesis, the rodents received doses of cocaine and were subsequently placed inside boxes for observation. “The typical behavior of pups is to huddle in a corner of their box. Under the influence of cocaine, the pups became more uninhibited, moving throughout the box. However, those administered antibodies exhibited normal behavior,” the researcher adds. The UFMG group plans to replicate the same experiment using Calixcoca.
As mentioned by Cruz, scientists must seek to gain an understanding of the mechanisms of addiction to find novel approaches for treatment. “Addiction has not yet been treated with the compassion it deserves. It’s not a character flaw or lack of willpower; it’s a lifelong illness,” says Cruz.
The UFMG group has been in discussions with potential funders for clinical trials. In June, the municipal government of São Paulo announced an R$4 million grant for the project and its intention to evaluate the administration of the vaccine among eligible groups, including people recovering from drug addiction, in the next phase of trials. Conversations are also underway with the São Paulo state government and the Butantan Institute. “We’ll require R$30 million for the Phase I and II clinical studies, which are expected to take between two and three years to complete,” says Cruz.
The researchers have already filed a patent for the candidate vaccine on behalf of UFMG and the Minas Gerais State Research Foundation (FAPEMIG), which is funding the project. In May, the UFMG study was selected as a finalist for the 2nd Euro Innovation in Health Award, an international initiative recognizing medical innovations sponsored by the Brazilian pharmaceutical company Eurofarma. n
Raissa Pereira, a PhD student at UFMG, holding a vial containing the Calixcoca vaccine formulation
EPIDEMIOLOGY
PREMATURE DEATHS
The suicide rate among indigenous people is almost three times greater than that among the general population
Renata Fontanetto
The already high suicide rate among indigenous people in Brazil has risen even further this century, remaining well above that of the general population. According to the most comprehensive survey on the subject, which was published in the journal The Lancet Regional Health – Americas in September 2023, the suicide rate among native peoples was 9.3 for every 100,000 individuals in 2000, which had almost doubled to 17.6 per 100,000 people by 2020. In the same period, the average suicide rate among the Brazilian population as a whole also increased, but to a much lesser extent. It rose from 4.6 deaths to 6.4 per 100,000 inhabitants, representing an increase of approximately 39%. The outcome of this disparate increase is that the suicide rate among indigenous people is now 2.7 times higher than that among the general population.
This Lancet study, which was the result of a collaboration between researchers from the Oswaldo Cruz Foundation (FIOCRUZ) and Harvard University, was the first article to assess the problem among indigenous Brazilians at the
Karajá village in Formoso do Araguaia, Tocantins, where the suicide rate has been increasing
national level. Previous surveys have indicated that the suicide rate among the general population in Brazil, despite being considered low compared to that in other countries, is on the rise. However, the authors of the new Lancet article identified gaps in the data regarding indigenous Brazilian peoples; i.e., previous studies measured the problem in specific states and over shorter periods of time.
In this study, psychiatrist Jacyra de Araújo and her colleagues determined the recent rise in suicide rates in Brazil based on figures recorded in the Brazilian Ministry of Health’s Mortality Information System. First, they identified the total number of individuals who took their own lives between 2000 and 2020 among both indigenous people and the general population. They then divided that number by the total number of individuals in each group (indigenous and general population) according to the 2010 Census, which provided the most recent data available at the time; i.e., 196.4 million people lived in Brazil in 2010, of which 897,000 were indigenous. The absolute number of individuals was corrected for each year based on projections from the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics (IBGE).
This study reached yet another conclusion. The act of taking one's own life, which is indicative of a profound sense of helplessness and is often associated with mental health problems such as depression, has shown to be a more prominent problem among young Indigenous people this century. Of the 2,021 cases of suicide recorded among indigenous people during the examined
THE RISE OF SUICIDE
IN BRAZIL
In the past two decades, the suicide rate among the indigenous population has remained much greater than that among the general population
period, 64% involved individuals aged under 24 years, and 68% were single; furthermore, death was almost always (90%) caused by hanging, suffocation, or strangulation. However, in the general population, the risk of suicide is highest in those aged over 60 years.
Another important point is that the suicide rates observed in these populations, while alarmingly high, may even be underestimated. “The quality of the Mortality Information System has improved over the last 20 years, but there are indications that suicides are still underreported, which is common worldwide due to stigma and the difficult nature of establishing whether the intention was to die,” explains Araújo, who is an associate researcher at FIOCRUZ’s Data and Knowledge Integration Center for Health (CIDACS) in Bahia and the lead author of the Lancet article. “The real rates may be even higher than those calculated in this study,” he states.
This peculiar pattern attracted the attention of the article’s authors. Suicide rates were found to vary greatly between Brazilian regions, even between those with large indigenous populations. For example, the rates were found to be several times greater in the Central-West and North Regions of the country— which have the third and first highest number of descendants of indigenous peoples, respectively—than in the Northeast Region, which has the second largest indigenous population in Brazil. “Indigenous suicide occurs in all regions and among all ethnicities, but it is disproportionately higher in certain states,” explains epidemiologist Jesem Orellana of FIOCRUZ’s Leônidas and Maria Deane Institute in Amazonas, who is coauthor of the Lancet article. The article also included the participation of scientists from Harvard Medical School and received funding from the US National Institutes of Health (NIH).
In contrast, the suicide rate among indigenous people in the central-western states decreased from 46 deaths per 100,000 inhabitants in 2000 to 34 per 100,000 in 2020. According to the 2010 Census, 143,400 descendants of indigenous peoples live in the region (16% of the country’s indigenous population). Despite the significant drop, however, the rate remains much higher than the national average. In the North Region of the country, which is inhabited by 342,900 indigenous people (38.2% of the total), the suicide rate increased more than tenfold during this period, jumping from 2.7 cases to 29 cases per 100,000 people. The Northeast Region, which is home to 232,700 Indigenous people, also saw an increase, albeit a much smaller one. The rate was found
to range from 1.4 deaths per 100,000 individuals to 4.8, which is well below the national average.
The states with the highest suicide rates were found to be Mato Grosso do Sul and Amazonas.
In the former, where 77,000 indigenous people live, the rate reached a frightening peak of 105 per 100,000 inhabitants in 2005, and it did not fall below 43 per 100,000 during the study period. With 184,000 descendants of indigenous peoples, the prevalence in Amazonas increased from 0.99 per 100,000 in 2000 to a peak of 45 per 100,000 in 2014; in 2020, it was 38.6 per 100,000.
“When data from these two states are excluded, the suicide rate among Indigenous people is almost identical to that of the general Brazilian population,” says Orellana.
The situation in Brazil, as described in the Lancet article, is similar to that observed in other countries. In a review published in the journal BMC Medicine in 2018, Canadian researchers compiled data from 99 scientific articles on indigenous suicide in more than 30 nations and territories. They concluded that suicide rates are often greater among indigenous people than among nonindigenous people, especially in countries such as Brazil, Canada, and Australia. Although the FIOCRUZ study did not delve into the reasons why indigenous people are more likely to commit suicide, other studies have provided some clues. In a review article published in Revista Panamericana de Salud Pública in 2020, a group led by Maycoln Teodoro, a psychologist from the Federal University of Minas Gerais (UFMG), listed the most frequent causes as
poverty, low indicators of well-being, historical and cultural factors, family disintegration, and a lack of meaning in life.
Invasions of their land and expulsion from territories where they originally lived, in addition to environmental degradation and forced changes in lifestyle habits, are among the factors that lead to so-called cultural death, which is another potential trigger of suicidal behavior. Some of the experts interviewed for this report also provided other reasons that may contribute to the higher suicide rates among indigenous people than among the rest of the population. For example, these individuals have less access to the educational system and health services. They also face higher levels of unemployment, while their levels of alcohol consumption and dependence are on the rise. Previous studies have shown that the loss of indigenous identity and sexual violence more commonly experienced by young people contribute significantly to this problem.
According to Juliana Kabad, a social scientist from the Institute of Public Health at the Federal University of Mato Grosso (UFMT), the causes that lead to suicide may vary among ethnic groups. “There are countless factors behind this problem. To identify them, we need to listen to the different Brazilian indigenous peoples and take into account the struggles each of them face in the form of persistent discrimination and plundering of their lands,” says the researcher, who was not involved in the Lancet study.
“Urgent action is needed to understand the suffering these young people experience due to violence and the severing of ties with their own community, so that we can fully support them,” says anthropologist Sandra Garcia of the Brazilian Center for Analysis and Planning (CEBRAP), who was also not involved in the Lancet study. “Combining nationwide and group-specific strategies, and considering ethnic diversity, is extremely important to suicide prevention,” she stresses.
Orellana, from FIOCRUZ in Amazonas, noted that from an epidemiological standpoint, some ethnicities are in more vulnerable situations than others. For example, the Guarani-Kaiowá from Mato Grosso do Sul have experienced clusters of suicides in the past, especially among the youngest age groups, as documented in a 1991 article in Cadernos de Saúde Pública. “Identifying these ethnicities is important for defining adequate prevention strategies, one of the priorities of the current administration,” says Matheus Cruz, a psychosocial care and healthy living technician from the Ministry of Health’s Department of Indigenous Health (SESAI). n
A man from the Karajá ethnic group stands beside the graves of three children who took their own lives
THE LONG HISTORY OF BEES
Pollinating insects are estimated to have appeared 120 million years ago on the Western Gondwana supercontinent, formed by what is currently South America and Africa
Sarah Schmidt
Approximately 120 million years ago, at the beginning of the Cretaceous period, groups of dinosaurs walked the earth when the first bees first appeared in what is currently South America and Africa and then connected as part of the Gondwana supercontinent. “The common ancestor of the bees probably appeared in the driest climate that this region had. To this day, the majority of the over 20,000 catalogued species prefer drier areas, where they are more diversified,” explained biologist Eduardo Almeida from the Ribeirão Preto campus of the University of São Paulo (USP), while preparing to present the results about the evolution of bees at a workshop in the city of Portal, Arizona, USA, in mid-August.
Alongside German colleague Silas Bossert from Washington State University, Eduardo Almeida led the study published in August in the journal Current Biology, which added more details to
the picture outlined in previous studies using DNA sequence analysis of different parts of the genome of 216 bee species from all seven families and 28 subfamilies known today. The samples were collected from all continents except Antarctica (the only continent uninhabited by the bees), thanks to the data and specimens in research museums—Almeida is the curator of the Prof. J. M. F. Camargo entomological collection, which houses hundreds of thousands of bees.
Almeida compared genetic estimates of age and geographic distribution data of these species with information from 220 fossils and the locations where they were collected. This information enabled the group to trace the family tree (phylogeny) of the bees, estimating the evolutionary kinship relationships between the major lineages and the ages of the evolutionary events. The result was a timeline that shows where and when the first species would have appeared and how the groups divided, diversified
A female orchid bee (Exaerete smaragdina) on a pickerelweed flower (Pontederia cordata) in Cosmópolis, São Paulo
colors, shapes, behaviors, and modes of organization, and spread across the planet over time, following the rearrangement of the continents.
According to the results of the group from Ribeirão Preto, from the moment that the common ancestor of the bees emerged approximately 124 million years ago, a continuous process of diversification was influenced by the configuration of the continents at the time, the rise and fall of the sea level and the climate changes that took place during the different geological periods.
“The separation of the supercontinent led to a change in the configuration of how the bees were spread across the world,” says Almeida. The data suggest that, of the seven extant families, only Melittidae did not exist approximately 100 million years ago in the region that today corresponds to South America.
This may be why the bees resisted the falling asteroid, deemed responsible for the mass extinction of the dinosaurs in the Gulf of Mexico approximately 60 million years ago. “They were already spread across the planet, in a distribution close to the current one,” Almeida states. He noted that from this period on, some tropical environments began to expand to more elevated latitudes, which enabled the groups that lived in the tropical and subtropical regions in the Southern Hemisphere to advance toward North America, Europe, Asia, and North Africa.
Groups of bees probably reached Australia between 70 and 35 million years ago, with the first originating in South America and following a route crossing
Antarctica, which connected the two continents to the south and had a milder climate than today. Later, bees that were already on the Asian continent would have also colonized Australia. They likely arrived in present-day India approximately 50 million years ago, after the territory—which had broken from Gondwana prior to the origin of bees— collided with the Asian continent and met the local fauna.
The appearance of the ancestral bee is unknown: Would it have been large or small? Did it live in organized societies in hives, or was it solitary? Almeida provides a guess: It was probably solitary since 85% of the species today have this habit, with their members living in individual burrows in the ground. Almeida has also been investigating a means of reconstructing the ancestral morphology of these insects.
The notion that the bees appeared in the western part of Gondwana, which included South America and Africa, is not new. It was proposed by the US entomologist Charles Michener (1918–2015) in 1979 in an article published in the journal Annals of the Missouri Botanical Garden.
Michener, Almeida’s academic “grandfather,” is a reference in the study of the evolution of bees, and he spent a year in Brazil in 1956, working with the Brazilian entomologist Jesus Santiago Moure (1912–2010), known as Father Moure, at the UFPR in Curitiba. “Forty years later, the advance in genetic and computational analysis, besides the discovery
of many bee fossils, allowed us to bring more evidence and new data for his hypothesis,” observes the researcher from Ribeirão Preto.
Biologist Vera Lucia Imperatriz Fonseca, from the São Paulo campus of USP, who did not participate in the study, observes that this is the broadest phylogenetic study of bees ever made. “In the past we used to study the bees in our backyard. Today, we can study the bees of the world,” she says, stressing the importance of preserving and expanding the country's collection of insects, including bees, for this type of research to be expanded.
“The association between bees and flowers over the millions of years is another point that the work helps to think about,” says biologist Guilherme Cunha Ribeiro of the Federal University of ABC (UFABC), who also did not participate in the study. In an article published in 2022 in the journal Cretaceous Research, Ribeiro and colleagues described a new species of extinct wasp in the Crabronidae family, the fossil of which was in the Crato Formation in Nova Olinda, Ceará. Its age is estimated to be between 125 million and 115 million years.
“We argued that, if the Crabronidae family, considered by some studies as a sister of the bees, already existed in this time period, then the bees would have also existed,” says Ribeiro. As fossils of bees have not been found, despite the great abundance of insects collected, he suggests that one of the explanations could be that they diversified further south on Gondwana.
Almeida explains that, at some point, carnivorous wasps became vegetarians, changing to feeding on pollen, after which the bees appeared. He states that “They became dependent on flowers and the main group responsible for pollination.” For this reason, one conclusion of his work is that the rich biodiversity of South American plants is related to the fact that this is the continent where bees have existed the longest. They took millions of years to establish themselves, adapt, and diversify. “If climate change radically transforms environments, we don't know if they will be able to adapt,” he warns. n
The research projects and scientific articles consulted for this report are listed in the online version.
A male of the Centris varia species on a guanhuma flower (Cordia superba) in Capão da Canoa, Rio Grande do Sul
THE LONG HISTORY OF THE SÃO FRANCISCO RIVER
In the last 90,000 years, the São Francisco River has straightened and deepened under the influences of erosion and dams
Carlos Fioravanti
The São Francisco River was once a long, meandering, shallow river; it formed nothing like the Xingó canyons that formed hundreds of millions of years ago on the border between the states of Sergipe and Alagoas, where its waters today flow between rock walls up to 50 meters (m) high.
Over the last 90,000 years, in response to changes in rainfall patterns and vegetation on the riverbanks, the shape of the São Francisco River, known locally as the “Velho Chico,” has changed significantly. The 2,863-kilometer (km) river cuts through 521 municipalities from its source in the Serra da Canastra Mountains of Minas Gerais.
When rain was more abundant, between 90,000 and 66,000 years ago, the river carried large amounts of sediment and carved through the land. When sediment volumes were particularly high, sand was deposited on the riverbed and banks, creating an pattern of multiple intertwined channels flowing at the same time. When there was less sediment and more moderate rainfall, between 66,000 and 39,000 years ago and between 19,000 and 9,000 years ago, broad sinuous curves called meanders formed. Meandering rivers are common in tropical and subtropical environments, exemplified by the Purus and Juruá rivers in the Amazon, which are the most winding rivers in the world, alongside the Mississippi River in the United States of America.
The river’s current path, approximately 20 m below its old position, took shape approximately 5,000 years ago, according to sediment analyses conducted by researchers from the University of São Paulo (USP), São Paulo State University (UNESP), the Federal University of São Paulo (UNIFESP), and the Federal University of Alagoas (UFAL).
Geologist Patrícia Mescolotti noted that sunlight last fell on the quartz crystals found in the sand on the riverbanks before they were covered by more recent sediment 90,000 years ago.
“The river is likely older, but we cannot say for sure,” said the researcher, who has been working at the Federal University of Mato Grosso do Sul (UFMS) in Campo Grande since May 2022. Describing the geomorphological dimensions of the river in a January 2022 article in the Brazilian Journal of Geomorphology, geologists Landerlei Santos of UNESP and Edgardo Latrubesse of the Federal University of Goiás (UFG) observed that some of the floodplains may have formed at the end of the Pleistocene epoch, between 10,000 and 82,000 years ago.
During her PhD at UNESP in Rio Claro, under the guidance of geologist Mario Assine and UNIFESP geographer Fabiano Pupim, Mescolotti examined sediments collected from 51 points along the riverbank in Bahia and from dunes in the municipality of Xique-Xique, in Bahia (see picture). She also studied aerial photographs and satellite images that showed the old riverbed—shaped like small horseshoes and abandoned as the water found easier paths to follow—and helped to reconstitute the terraces (former floodplains), which extended beyond the old riverbanks.
“Despite the river being a symbol of the Northeast, the flow of the São Francisco appears to be controlled by the South American monsoon system [characterized by intense rainfall in the summer and dry winters], which takes water from the Amazon to the Southeast of Brazil,” explains Pupim. Unlike other large rivers, most of which are supplied by tributaries along their entire course, the São Francisco River receives most of its water near its source from tributaries such as the Rio das Velhas (the largest), the Paracatu, and the Urucuia Rivers. “As has been the case for thousands of years, approximately two-thirds of the river’s water continues to come from the region of the river’s source in Minas Gerais.” By the time it reaches the municipality of Januária, less than a thousand km from its source, the river already has almost 70% of its volume, as described in an article published in Quaternary Science Reviews in April 2021.
Cliff faces in Canindé de São Francisco, Sergipe, are shown.
The river is fed primarily by water from the mountains in Minas Gerais
HOW A RIVER MAKES ITS WAY
The São Francisco River has excavated rock, deposited sediment, straightened, and deepened throughout its geological history 1 2 3 4
Before 90,000 years ago
Under abundant rainfall, the river carried large amounts of sediment (gravel) and formed interweaving channels
At the same time, in 2016, the USP geologist Cristiano Mazur Chiessi and colleagues studied the behavior of the São Francisco River basin by examining the proportions of two distinct forms of hydrogen and carbon in tree and grass remains accumulated in marine sediments, which were collected from depths of 1,897 m, less than 1 km from the river mouth on the border of Alagoas and Sergipe. Their conclusions were similar to those of Pupim's group: “Rainfall in the São Francisco River drainage basin, particularly at the headwaters and in the middle section, comes mainly from the Amazon,” says Chiessi. “We did not notice any significant long-term changes in the water source.”
From 66,000 to 39,000 years ago
With moderate rainfall and less surface sediment, the river became more winding and transported sand and clay
The hydrogen and carbon distributions indicated periods of more or less intense rainfall in the São Francisco Basin. “When the dry season was shorter, trees occupied a greater area in the Cerrado in the area of the river basin near the source. When dry seasons were longer, conversely, grasses predominated,” says USP geologist Jaqueline Quirino Ferreira, lead author of an article detailing the group’s results, published in Quaternary Science Reviews in March 2022.
From 18,000 to 9,000 years ago
After narrowing and deepening, the sinuous river carried and deposited fine sediments and sand
A particular aspect of Velho Chico is that it crosses three natural environments—the Atlantic Forest, Cerrado (savanna), and Caatinga (semiarid scrublands). “Long rivers that flow from north to south or south to north generally cross more than one type of natural environment, such as the Paraná River, which cuts through the Atlantic Forest and southern Brazil and Argentina,” explains José Cândido Stevaux, a geologist from the Federal University of Mato Grosso do Sul (UFMS) in Três Lagoas who worked with Mescolotti.
São Francisco has one of the largest artificial lakes in the world, the 4,214 km2 Sobradinho dam reservoir, which is part of the power plant
In the last 5,000 years
The river has widened and assumed its current less meandering shape, once again depositing sand and gravel
Before being divided by rivers, the dunes of Xique-Xique (Bahia) once formed a singular area
SHIFTING DUNES
Based on analyses of sand collected from depths of up to 2 meters, the dunes in Xique-Xique, Bahia, which currently occupy an area of 8,000 km2, began to be formed by sand from the São Francisco River at least 150,000 years ago, when the climate was dry, as described in an article published in the journal Geomorphology in January.
“In several places, the dunes were once more extensive and formed a single area, which is today divided by the rivers that flow into the São Francisco,” says Patricia Mescolotti, from the UFMS. Different reptile and mammalian species, which are differentiated from a single species, live on either side.
The dunes, up to 30 m high, shift in response not only to the river sands that feed them but also to the removal of vegetation from the riverbanks and the intensity of droughts, according to a paper published in Geomorphology by Santos and Latrubesse in November 2021. The authors observed that the dunes migrated an average of 15 meters per year between 2002 and 2010 and 9.4 meters per year from 2010 to 2019.
Approximately 15 years ago, sand from the Geleia dunes covered roads and houses in the village of Icatu, Bahia, forcing inhabitants to move to previously settled dunes.
flow, he concluded that in Piranhas, the depth decreased in response to an increased flow caused by the Xingó hydroelectric plant built on the border between Alagoas and Sergipe in 1994. “Before, there was a layer of sediment at the bottom of the river, the depth of which was adjusted depending on the flow rate,” he says. When the dam was built, the sediment layer was removed, the bed rocks were exposed, and the river could only make lateral adjustments, increasing its width.
In the region between Propriá in Sergipe and Porto Real do Colégio in Alagoas, the river’s banks widened by 250 m from 1969 to 2022. “This is a very high erosion rate, approximately 5 m per year,” Panta emphasizes. According to him, erosion is not continuous—it is episodic. “A single flood can wash away tons of sediment.”
In Propriá, the river's flow was maintained, but its width increased from 600 m to 720 m after the Xingó power plant began operating 150 km downstream in 1994. In Carinhanha, southwest of Bahia, the depth of the river increased from 2 m to 3 m after the construction of the Três Marias dam 700 km to the south, which was also completed in 1994. “The figures are similar to those of other tropical river systems, such as Tocantins-Araguaia and Paraná,” he noted.
In Piaçabuçu, a municipality in Alagoas located 10 km from the river mouth, an unusual number of teenagers and adults suffer hypertension, the cause of which was discovered in 2017: during a drought, seawater flows back into the river, and people consume untreated brackish water. “The sea advances more easily into the river mouth now because since the dams were built, the river flow is controlled by the demand for electricity,” says Panta.
In Piranhas, Alagoas, the river has become shallower in response to the increased flow caused by the Xingó dam
of the same name in northern Bahia. This and four other large hydroelectric power plants (Três Marias, Luís Gonzaga, Xingó, and Paulo Afonso) alter the width, depth, speed, and flow of the river and consequently change the lives of residents in nearby towns.
“The effects of the dams are clearer near the mouth, especially in three municipalities in Alagoas (Piranhas, Pão de Açúcar, and Traipu) and one in Sergipe (Propriá),” observes geographer Genisson Panta, a PhD student at the Federal University of Pernambuco (UFPE) and high school teacher at a state public school in Maceió. Motivated by Stevaux, who he met at a conference in Fortaleza, Ceará, he has been studying these changes since 2019 and presented them in an article published in the Journal of South American Earth Sciences in January.
Based on field research and the analysis of data from hydrometric stations that measure the river’s
Given its current name by Italian explorer Américo Vespúcio (1454–1512) in 1501 and even still the stage for events such as a boat procession in Penedo, Alagoas, every January, the São Francisco River continues to be transformed by both human and natural forces. One ongoing major project is the transfer of its water, which started in 2007 and was partially completed by 2022, through the construction of 700 km of concrete canals to supply farms and residents in the interior of northeastern Brazil.
“To be successful, a strong plan is needed on how much water to take and how to distribute it, perhaps not taking it at certain times of the year so as not to harm the river,” says Stevaux. “Hundreds of rivers have been diverted around the world. Dams cause much worse impacts.” n
The scientific articles consulted for this report are listed in the online version.
THE GREEN CARPET CONTRIBUTION
Moss-covered areas capture 6.43 billion tons of carbon a year and have a coverage area nearly that of China
Guilherme Eler
Annually, moss-covered areas absorb 6.43 billion tons more carbon from the atmosphere than land environments that are not covered by this type of vegetation. This amount, reported in an international study published in the scientific journal Nature Geoscience in May, is equivalent to more than six years of global carbon emissions associated with land-use changes, such as those from the transformation of forest swaths into agricultural or pasture areas. Like all plant matter, mosses capture carbon dioxide (CO2) through photosynthesis, reducing the atmospheric levels of the gas that is
the main contributor to the greenhouse effect and causes global warming.
In the study, which was conducted by researchers based in Brazil, estimates of the area of the planet occupied by moss were also reported: 9.4 million square kilometers (km2), almost equivalent to that of China. This figure was generated after moss sampling was conducted in 123 ecosystems across all continents. Unlike vascular plants (trees, bushes, herbs, and ferns), mosses are a type of plant in the Bryophyta group that do not synthesize lignin in their cell walls; for this reason, mosses do not have woody, rigid parts. Moss was one of the first plants to exist in the land environment almost 500 million years ago and is par-
Mosses were one of the first plants to exist in the land environment almost 500 million years ago
ticularly important in places where vascular plants do not survive, carpeting forest floors and fields and growing on tree trunks and rocks. There are currently at least 12,000 species of moss that are spread across all the world’s continents.
This study involved 50 scientists from around the globe who submitted moss samples from tropical climates such as the Australian outback zone and from icy zones such as Antarctica. Analyses were conducted on specimens from forested areas, meadows, and pastures in natural and urban environments. In Brazil, moss samples were only collected from the Cerrado (wooded savannah) region.
The results of this study reinforce the importance of preserving moss-covered areas, which has yet to be investigated in depth. “Within the global climate change scenario, there is a need to incentivize studies into this group of plants, which are very sensitive to changes in their habitat,” said botanist Alberto Teixido of the Complutense University of Madrid, one of the article’s authors. Spanish by birth, Teixido lived in Brazil for eight years until July last year, during which time he undertook postdoctoral work at the Federal University of Minas Gerais (UFMG), subsequently becoming a visiting professor at the Federal University of Mato Grosso (UFMT). Another author of the study with links to Brazil is Colombian biologist Gabriel Peñaloza-Bojacá, who performed his PhD at the UFMG.
The aim of this study was to analyze moss-covered regions and compare them with regions without this type of vegetative cover. In total, the researchers identified 24 different ways in which mosses contribute to the soil environment and to other plants. This type of vegetation, for example, influences the microclimate of ecosystems and helps to control humidity and temperature. In addition to reducing global warming contributions, carbon absorbed by moss aids in the growth of nearby plants. Mossy soils have relatively high concentrations of nutrients such as nitrogen, phosphorus, and magnesium and relatively high levels of enzyme activity.
These benefits come about because mosses, particularly those of the Sphagnum genus, are able to create a humid ecosystem with organic material harboring a wide range of microbes, fungi, and invertebrates. All of these factors give rise to effective and rapid nutrient cycling and organic material decomposition processes. Moss-covered ground, when compared to surfaces without moss, exhibits less erosion and contains fewer pathogens responsible for causing disease in plants.
According to Teixido, there is a lack of consolidated data on the importance of mosses in Brazilian ecosystems. “We need more experts to describe and identify the physiology and ecology of mosses across different ecosystems, such as Amazonia,” he commented. According to the Flora e Funga do Brasil project, which is coordinated by the Rio de Janeiro Botanical Gardens, there are 896 moss species in the country, many of which occur in Atlantic Forest areas.
The botanist Denilson Fernandes Peralta of the São Paulo State Institute for Environmental Studies (IPA) acknowledged that the estimates of moss-covered areas around the globe were impressive, but he pointed out certain limitations of the new study. “Moss specimens from important Brazilian biomes such as the Atlantic Forest, Amazonia, and Caatinga (semiarid scrublands), South American Patagonia, and northern hemisphere tundra were not included in the research,” said Peralta, a specialist in seedless plants, flowers, and fruits that reproduce using spores, such as bryophytes. “This means that the data may result in underestimates, and further revisions may be needed.” Even so, according to Peralta, the survey presented in the article is significant for understanding the environmental significance and services provided by mosses. n
The scientific article consulted for this report is referenced in the online version.
THE POWER OF SALT
Charge
Researchers developed the first prototype of a Brazilian sodium battery, which could provide an alternative
to lithium storage modules
Domingos Zaparolli
Sodium (Na), a chemical element abundant in nature is found in sea water and salt reserves on every continent. Experts estimate that this substance could be an important alternative in the energy storage process, with the potential to replace up to 25% of today's lithium batteries, which are used to power electric cars, drones, smartphones, notebooks, tablets, and other electronic devices.
Currently, a team from the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Campinas (FEEC-UNICAMP) is developing the first Brazilian sodium battery prototype. Currently, only Chinese manufacturers offer commercial batteries using this technology, and the first electric vehicles equipped with these modules are expected to be on the market this year.
The Brazilian project is being developed within the scope of the Center for Innovation in New Energies (CINE), an Engineering Research Center (CPE) supported by FAPESP, with the AngloDutch company Shell. “We already have the capacity to develop the technology and produce the first prototypes,” says physicist Hudson Zanin, a professor at FEEC-UNICAMP and the project's lead researcher.
Together with colleagues from the Santa Catarina company WEG, which specializes in manufacturing electric motors, UNICAMP researchers recently submitted a project proposal to the
national program Rota 2030, which was created to stimulate innovation in the automotive production chain. The proposed goal is to develop and produce 1-amp-hour (Ah) sodium batteries with 1.2 kilowatt-hour (kWh) energy storage modules suitable for equipping hybrid electric cars. These types of vehicles are fueled with liquid fuel, such as gasoline and ethanol, and use a complementary electric motor powered by the combustion engine itself.
The sodium and lithium battery technologies are very similar, as Zanin explains. In both battery types, ions (atoms that have an electric charge) carry out the task of transporting and storing electrons during the energy charge and discharge processes. To do this, the ions must penetrate the structure of the electrodes, which are made up of a positive pole—the cathode—and a negative pole—the anode.
The difference is that the sodium ion is larger than the lithium ion and thus has more difficulty penetrating the structure of the electrodes. This makes developing electrodes that facilitate this operation a prerequisite. “In lithium batteries, the anode is made of graphite; in sodium batteries, it is made of a different carbon structure. One uses lithium-based cathodes and the other sodium,” explains Zanin.
In August 2022, the UNICAMP team published an article in the Journal of Energy Storage demonstrating the potential of using a new material for electrode construction, one composed
of carbon nanotubes with nanoparticles of niobium pentoxide, which increased the capacity and speed of transport and storage of electrical charges from sodium ions. The study evaluated sodium electrodes used in batteries and in supercapacitors, which are electronic devices also used for energy storage.
The research was conducted as part of computer engineer Carla Martins Real's doctorate in electrical engineering, under Zanin's guidance, with participation from researchers from Kansas State University in the United States, the Federal University of Jequitinhonha and Mucuri Valleys (UFVJM) in Minas Gerais, and the Federal University of Mato Grosso (UFMT).
Lithium batteries are currently considered the most efficient technology for increasing energy density (see Pesquisa FAPESP issue no. 285). These batteries have a 30% greater energy-carrying capacity than a sodium battery with the same physical volume. In addition, they are more durable because they have better cyclability; that is, they perform a greater number of energy charge and discharge cycles. While a lithium battery can perform 12,000 cycles during its useful life, sodium batteries—for now—have not yet reached 4,000 cycles.
Zanin considers, however, that sodium modules have significant competitive advantages that could boost their use in the coming years. “Sodium is an affordable raw material available in any country. Refining it on a large scale will provide the sodium battery greater economic viability when compared to lithium batteries, which will face strong market demand,” he says.
Lithium is an ore with limited known reserves that is found only in a few countries, such as Bolivia, Chile, Argentina, Portugal, and Australia. In Brazil, the only known commercially viable reserve is in the Jequitinhonha Valley in Minas Gerais. According to a 2021 estimate by the International Energy Agency (IEA), lithium consumption is expected to increase 75-fold by 2050.
SODIUM
BATTERIES
WILL OCCUPY SPECIFIC MARKET NICHES, SUCH AS STORAGE FOR WIND AND SOLAR ENERGY
The global consultancy Benchmark Mineral Intelligence calculates that it will be necessary to open 59 new lithium mines just to meet the demand expected through 2035. “Since there won't be enough lithium for everyone, sodium could be an alternative,” Zanin says.
Another problem with lithium, explains the researcher, is that the process of refining the ore to a grade adequate for use in batteries consumes a large amount of energy. When the energy sources used are not renewable, he points out, the production process has a large environmental impact. “Extracting and processing sodium, on the other hand, has a very low carbon footprint,” he observes.
Despite these advantages, chemist Roberto Manuel Torresi, an electroactive materials specialist from the Institute of Chemistry at the University of São Paulo (IQ-USP), believes that sodium batteries will not replace lithium storage modules but will occupy niches in different markets.
Anna Peluso, a master's student at UNICAMP, works on a sodium battery assembly
PREVENTING FIRE HAZARDS
An additive developed in Brazil is designed to prevent batteries from catching fire
One undesirable characteristic of batteries is that they are flammable. Shocks, punctures, and overheating pose safety risks for smartphone users, notebooks, and electric vehicles. An additive capable of preventing these devices from catching fire was developed by researchers at CINE, a research center supported by FAPESP and Shell.
“The additive is a polymer that, when added to a battery's electrolyte, prevents fires,” explains physicist Hudson Zanin from FEECUNICAMP. The recipe used for the polymer is being kept secret, as the technology is under patent analysis at the National Institute of Industrial Property (INPI).
An electrolyte is most commonly a liquid substance that is used for conducting electrical ions between the two poles (cathode and anode) of a battery. They are usually produced from fossil hydrocarbons obtained during the oil refining process and are flammable as a result.
“The innovation our group created uses conventional electrolytes to which an additive is added that plasticizes and unifies the electrolyte's molecules, preventing a possible fire in the equipment,” explains Zanin. In tests carried out at UNICAMP, batteries treated with the additive were cut, perforated, and exposed to fire and did not burn or explode.
The additive, according to the researcher, will be a very small ingredient in the formulation of the electrolyte. Because the polymer used is inexpensive and accessible, the eventual application of this technology should not have a significant impact on the end cost of batteries or supercapacitors (electronic devices that are also used for energy storage).
The São Paulo startup Brenergies Solutions, a spin-off from FEEC-UNICAMP formed by professors and students from the institution, will be responsible for making the additive available to the market. There is still no set time frame for its release.
He says that lithium batteries, due to their energy density, tend to predominate in light electronics. Sodium technology will be applied in stationary batteries, such as those used in energy security systems for data centers and ATMs or for storing wind and solar photovoltaic energy to reduce interruptions in the power supply when there is a lack of wind and sun. “In other words, sodium batteries are interesting but destined for specific applications,” says Torresi.
ELECTRIC VEHICLES
Zanin, however, also sees potential in the electric vehicle sector. He expects that at first, the technology will be used for large vehicles, such as buses, trucks, trains, and ships.
In China, recently, automakers announced that they were preparing to launch electric cars with sodium-ion batteries. BYD, which also makes batteries, will use its own technology, while the automaker Chery will use modules designed by the Chinese battery manufacturer CATL. Since February, an electric model from Jac Motors has been tested with a system created by the HiNa Battery. French automaker Renault, which maintains a partnership with the Chinese corporation Jiangling Motors Electric Vehicle (JMEV), announced that it would launch its first vehicle
A prototype battery created by the research group in Campinas is cut into, without catching fire
The global search for technologies to prevent batteries from burning saw its first product hit the market in 2021, with the launch of a less flammable lithium-iron-phosphate battery created by the Chinese electric vehicle manufacturer BYD. The new battery underwent extreme test conditions and was drilled, crushed, and heated in an oven at 300° C without fires or explosions. The module is already applied in certain BYD vehicle models.
using sodium batteries later this year, with technology supplied by the Chinese firm Farasis Energy. “The abundance of sodium supply in virtually all countries,” predicts that Zanin “will allow for the emergence of various energy storage technologies and different production processes around the world."
For Flávia Consoni, the founder and coordinator of the Light Electric Vehicle Study Lab (LEVE), which is based at the Institute of Geosciences (IG) at UNICAMP, batteries remain the major bottleneck for the expansion of electric mobility due to the growing demand for natural resources and the environmental and social impacts of mining. Therefore, initiatives that investigate the use of other minerals, in addition to lithium, are always welcomed and necessary. “The sodium battery is already a reality for stationary applications. It has potential for other purposes, but these are still future prospects. Despite recent advances, the technology still has issues, such as the need to increase its energy density. These are aspects that need to be considered, especially when thinking about applications that demand high energy density.” n
The project and scientific article consulted for this report are listed in the online version.
BIOTECHNOLOGY
Alow-cost, user-friendly disposable sensor made of cardboard and containing gold nanoparticles may become a useful tool for monitoring the quality of water consumed by the population. In the final phase of development, the analytical device was designed by a team headed by chemist Thiago Regis Longo Cesar da Paixão of the University of São Paulo’s Institute of Chemistry (IQ-USP) and coordinator of the Laboratory of Electronic Tongues and Chemical Sensors at the same institution. This research, supported by FAPESP, resulted in an article published in early 2023 in the scientific journal Sensors & Diagnostics. The group is preparing a patent application for the manufacturing process.
“Producing inexpensive sensors that can be distributed around Brazil enables real-time monitoring of water supplied to the population. The collated data may guide the formulation of public policies by government agencies and inform the decision-making process for water treatment companies,” notes Paixão. The estimated cost of one of these sensors—subject to confirmation—is R$0.50.
A TEST OF QUALITY
A modified cardboard sensor with gold particles may help monitor the quality of water consumed by the population
Yuri Vasconcelos
The fabrication process for the device, a small cardboard rectangle measuring 15 millimeters (mm) wide by 20 mm long and 1 mm thick, is practically free of chemical reagents, is commonly used in the manufacture of sensors and is almost fully automated. In addition to cardboard, which can be obtained from a recycling center, researchers used glue, waterproofing spray, and a small amount of gold solution (30 micrograms). The carbon dioxide (CO2) laser applied to the cardboard creates conductive patterns, the basis for the detection electrodes. The gold solution is added to the patterns, and then a new laser is applied to synthesize the gold nanoparticles (see infographic on next page).
“The nanoparticles improve the performance of the device,” explains the researcher. “The sensor takes measurements of electrical current created by an electrochemical reaction on the conductive surface when electrical power is applied. The higher the concentration is of chemical substance to be identified in the water sample placed on the sensor, the stronger the current generated.” To make the device work, -0.2 volts (V) of electrical power needs to be applied to the central electrode—this is less than a small AAA-size battery (1.5 V).
A carbon dioxide laser was applied to cardboard, creating a conductive pattern to initiate sensor electrodes
HOW THE NEW SENSOR IS MADE
The process is almost fully automated and takes approximately 5 minutes to complete
CARDBOARD PREPARATION
Two sheets of kraft paper are stuck together with glue and placed into a thermal press. An impermeable white varnish spray is applied to prevent the paper from absorbing the sample solution during measurements
CREATION OF THE DETECTION ELECTRODE
A CO2 laser applied to the paper converts the cellulose into carbon and creates a conductive pattern that produces three detection electrodes. The gold solution is added to the pattern
The fact that this material is produced without human handling has several advantages. “Laboratories often go through a series of manual stages to make sensors, which provides little capacity to replicate them. When we resort to machines, such as the one that emits the laser, we avoid this manual intervention in the fabrication process,” explains Paixão. The chemist Wendell Karlos Tomazelli Coltro, director of the Institute of Chemistry at the Federal University of Goiás (IQ-UFG), who did not participate in the study, agrees. “Laser-based technology is very attractive as it enables production to be scaled with high levels of replication,” he says. Coltro believes that the device presents a high level of innovation. “The USP team was pioneer in proposing the use of lasers to produce cardboard sensors, making the device sustainable and enabling its production anywhere in the world,” he concludes. In laboratory tests to assess the performance of the sensor, the researchers used sodium hypochlorite as a proof of concept. Chlorine is a substance commonly used to disinfect water in swimming pools, and chlorine at high
NANOPARTICLE SYNTHESIS
A laser is applied again to synthesize the gold nanoparticles. During this process, the gold ions are converted into metallic gold by the laser energy
concentrations may be harmful to human health. The maximum level of free chloride in swimming pools permitted by the World Health Organization (WHO) is between 3 and 5 parts per million (ppm). According to the Sensors & Diagnostics article, a study conducted at the Institute of Chemistry enabled the detection of up to 0.5 ppm sodium hypochlorite in water.
To identify other chemical species in water samples, the platform would have to be adapted—the term “chemical species” refers to the different forms in which chemical substances are found in nature, such as atoms, molecules, and ions. “We have designed sensors to measure toxic metals, pesticides, and pharmaceuticals, as well as other species of environmental interest such as nitrite and nitrate,” says the USP researcher. A specific sensor would need to be projected for each different substance, but it is possible to set up a group of sensors to simultaneously detect the presence of several substances.
SURFACE WATERPROOFING
A silicone glue is placed on the sensor surface to create a barrier to confine the water sample solution during the sensing process
For now, only the sensor has been created, but USP researchers state that they have the capacity to design the full system, including the device that reads the data, with no estimated cost. It is also possible to use a portable reader available on the market—something similar to the plastic strips used to measure blood glucose levels—which are inserted into devices known as glucometers.
The next step in the research is to formulate a pilot plan for large-scale testing of the sensor by untrained users in their homes. This will help to refine the device. Going forward, the group intends to identify a company interested in producing the sensor commercially.
“Talks are ongoing,” says Paixão, emphasizing that the quest for cardboard sensors or device arrangements for real-time water quality monitoring is not restricted to Brazil. Startups LAIIER, in London, England; iFlux, in Niel, Belgium; and OmniVis, in San Francisco, USA, are also working on the design of similar apparatuses. n
The scientific project and article consulted for this report are listed in the online version.
SOURCE THIAGO REGIS LONGO CÉSAR DA PAIXÃO (IQ-USP)
FROM THE MARGINS TO ACADEMIA
Fifty years since it began, the hip-hop movement is the subject of Brazilian research in fields such as anthropology and education
Christina Queiroz
Harvard University website offers access to films, photographs, pamphlets, references, and other items related to
In a June episode of the Mano a Mano podcast, Mano Brown and Thaíde discussed the changes they had seen in Pedreira, a neighborhood in the far south of São Paulo that the rappers both know well. “This place used to be really poor. Of course the keen eye of a sociologist would find tons of flaws there—we’re talking about a favela, after all. But for us, it is clear how the people there fought and prospered,” noted Brown, the host of the podcast. The different ways in which people see poor urban areas, as alluded to by Brown, a member of the rap group Racionais MC's, reflects a movement that has been growing in Brazil over the last 20 years and involves the incorporation of hip-hop—a social, political, and cultural movement that emerged in the USA in the 1970s—as a subject of study at Brazilian universities. As hip-hop turns 50, these forms of expression that were previously marginalized in academia are now coming to be seen as “sociohistorical explanations of how Brazil works,” according to anthropologist Waldemir Rosa of the Federal University for Latin American Integration (UNILA).
Hip-hop was born in New York City in areas that were affected by poverty, violence, lack of infrastructure, and the illegal drug trade and home to much of the city's Black and Latino population. A party thrown in the Bronx in August 1973, which featured music by Jamaican-American DJ Kool Herc, is considered the inaugural milestone of the movement. He is credited with inventing the “break,” introducing new sounds or changing the rhythm of songs using record-mixing equipment. At the same event, people began to improvise rhymes over DJ Kool Herc’s music, creating rap, which is an acronym for rhythm and poetry. In addition to music, hip-hop encompasses artistic expressions through graffiti, break dancing (a style of urban dance based on breakbeats), and others.
A break dancer (left) and graffiti (above) in São Paulo; in addition to rap, hip-hop culture includes other forms of artistic expression
The
hip-hop
According to sociologist Daniela Vieira dos Santos of the State University of Londrina (UEL), hip-hop first emerged in Brazil with the introduction of break dancing in the 1980s, inspired by American movies about the new form of dance, such as Wild Style (1972), which was directed by Charlie Ahearn, and Beat Street (1984), which was directed by Stan Lathan. During this period, members of the movement in the city of São Paulo, who were known locally as hip-hoppers, danced at parties called black balls. At the end of the 1980s, the events started being held at the São Bento subway station and on 24 de Maio Street in the city center, which became meeting points for people in the scene. UNILA’s Rosa explains that “The first art form that reached the young participants of these black balls was break dancing, followed by rap. Just like in the USA, people in Brazil became involved in this cultural movement to escape the violence and danger of their urban lives”.
Around this time, according to the UEL professor, the first hip-hop groups began to form in the city of São Paulo, spreading the principles of hip-hop culture, politically educating poor urban youth, and suggesting ways to overcome inequalities. The sociologist explains that “Rap really consolidated itself as a musical genre in Brazil at the end of the 1990s, thanks in large part to the success of Racionais MC’s, considered the most important rap group in the country when they released the album Sobrevivendo no inferno [Surviving in hell; 1997]”.
Gabriel Gutierrez, a researcher from the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ), states that academic work on hip-hop flourished in the USA in the 1980s, often associated with the field of African studies, especially the sociology of culture. Gutierrez, who has been studying the movement for approximately 10 years, notes, “It was a specific type of rap called Afrocentric rap, which has a strong political focus and was made famous by the duo Public Enemy, that propelled academic interest in hip-hop”. According to this scholar, many of these Afrocentric rap groups consisted of the Black middle-class and university students from New York City. He notes, “They created protest music that many politicians and the police were unhappy about, but even so, they were absorbed by the cultural industry. These artists had contracts with major record labels, were invited to appear on television, and were constantly in the media”.
IOf the various forms of artistic expression encompassed by hip-hop, rap has had the greatest impact over the last five decades because it is easy to share music, as noted by the UEL professor. The first albums from the genre recorded in Brazil were the compilations Hip hop cultura de rua (Hip-hop street culture; 1988) and Consciência black – Volume 1 (Black consciousness – Volume 1; 1988). The latter, which was released by the record label Zimbabwe Records, featured two tracks by Racionais MC’s, which was formed the same year by Mano Brown, Ice Blue, Edi Rock, and KL Jay: “Tempos difíceis” (Difficult times) and “Pânico na zona sul” (Panic in the South Zone). The same compilation also included the song “Nossos dias” (Our days) by Sharylaine. According to Vieira dos Santos, Sharylaine was the first woman to record a rap song in Brazil.
n Brazil, the first academic papers on hip-hop were written in the 1990s. One pioneering paper was the doctoral thesis “Invadindo a cena urbana dos anos 1990 – Funk e hip hop” (Invading the urban scene of the 1990s – Funk and hip-hop), which was defended at the UFRJ in 1998 by historian Micael Herschmann, who is now supervising Gutierrez's postdoctoral fellowship at the same institution. One of the earliest works, according to musicologist Walter Garcia of the Institute of Brazilian Studies at the University of São Paulo (IEB-USP), was a doctoral thesis on rap in the city of São Paulo that was completed at the University of Campinas (UNICAMP) in 1998 by anthropologist José Carlos Gomes da Silva, who is now a professor at the Federal University of São Paulo (UNIFESP). Another example is Elaine Nunes de Andrade’s master's thesis on rap and education, which was written at USP’s School of Education (FE) in 1996. Garcia began studying rap based on the Racionais MC's albums Raio X do Brasil (X-ray of Brazil; 1993) and Sobrevivendo no inferno (Surviving in hell; 1997) and after reading two issues of the magazine Caros amigos (Dear friends).
The Afro Cebrap Collection holds material donated by collectors, artists, and Black activists
Invitation to the party that gave birth to the hip-hop movement 50 years ago and DJ Kool Herc in New York, 2019
The first featured a report on Mano Brown, and the second featured a special report on hip-hop that was based on the undergraduate work of anthropologist Spency Kmitta Pimentel, who is currently a professor at the Federal University of Southern Bahia (UFSB). Garcia notes, “My intention was and continues to be to critique Racionais MC’s aesthetics in the context of a broader study of popular and commercial music in Brazil”. Holocausto urbano (Urban holocaust; 1990) was the group's first record in a complete discography that consists of eight original titles and two compilations. The musicologist states that despite differences between the albums, “the artistic value of Racionais MC’s comes from the combination of musical merit and the topics addressed.” According to Garcia, musical merit is a mixture of several artistic elements: word choice, rhymes, figures of speech, narratives, character construction and interpretation, musical accompaniment, balance, and more.
Richard Santos, a sociologist from UFSB, notes that, in the same way as in the USA, Brazilian television started broadcasting programs about hip-hop between the 1980s and 1990s, which sparked young people's interest in researching the subject. Santos, also known as Big Richard, was once a promoter of the movement and other marginal cultures in Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo, in addition to directing and presenting television programs on various TV stations. Now the vice dean of outreach and culture at UFSB, he was at the forefront of the process of awarding Mano Brown an honorary PhD in early November.
Hip-hop as a subject of study in academia has grown in part thanks to a Brazilian law (Law 10.639/2003) that established the mandatory teaching of African and Afro-Brazilian history and culture in education, according to Rosa, from the UNILA. Boosted by the introduction of affirmative action in Brazilian universities—designed to encourage Black and other minority populations to enter academia— the first study in the 2000s sought to analyze the relationships between hip-hop and racial identities in fields such as sociology, history, and literature. Later, Rosa explains, hip-hop began to be studied by urban anthropology researchers, with a focus on youth and racialized identities. For his master's degree, which he completed at the University of Brasília (UnB) in 2006, he investigated the construction process of young, Black, heterosexual, masculine identity in the lyrics of rappers from poor urban neighborhoods in São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro, the Federal District, Goiás, and other locations. During his PhD, which he defended at UFRJ in 2014, the anthropologist analyzed the relationships between hip-hop and the public authorities. Rosa notes, “I found that organizations and associations sought to establish legal entities during the 2000s so that they could access public funding to promote cultural and community activities”. He adds that since 2010, as the movement has continued to gain ground in academia, hip-hop has begun to experience an epistemological turn, which is seen as a potential way of explaining the functioning and history of Brazilian society.
Mano Brown on the cover of Brazil’s first hip-hop magazine in 1993
Thaíde and DJ Hum perform at a festival in São Paulo, 1999 (above). A pioneering artist on the Brazilian scene, the rapper Sharylaine, in 2023 (right)
The introduction of hip-hop as a subject of study in academia is aligned with the movement undergoing an increasingly intense institutionalization process. Break dancing, for example, is set to feature as an Olympic sport for the first time at the Paris Olympics in 2024. In Brazil, part of this trend is the establishment of state and municipal decrees recognizing hip-hop as a form of cultural heritage, as well as the creation of public funding streams, museums, and cultural centers. In October, the Brazilian Ministry of Culture (MinC) launched a R$6-million call for proposals designed to recognize and value hip-hop culture. In July, a law (Law 7.274) that acknowledged the movement as a cultural and intangible heritage of the Federal District was passed, and the city of Campinas in São Paulo State is currently preparing to issue a similar decree. The government of Rio Grande do Sul plans to inaugurate the Hip-Hop Culture Museum in Porto Alegre in December. The 4,000-squaremeter space, which is situated in a former school and was conceived by rapper Rafael Rafuagi, will bring together a collection of approximately 10,000 items, including instruments, record players, pamphlets, and other documents, that have been collected from across the state of Rio Grande do Sul. “In addition, we have just presented a participatory inventory of hip-hop culture in each state of Brazil to the National Institute for Historical and Artistic Heritage [IPHAN] requesting that it be made heritage,” says Rafuagi. The
aim of heritagization is to encourage the development of artistic and historical expressions through the appreciation and revitalization of certain cultures.
“Hip-hop managed to legitimize itself in society despite historically facing prejudice,” says UNICAMP anthropologist Jacqueline Lima Santos, one of the organizers of the Festival Internacional Hip Hop 50, which was held by the institution in November to celebrate the movement's fiftieth anniversary. Together with Vieira dos Santos from UEL, Lima Santos manages an imprint focused on hip-hop publications at the publishing company Editora Perspectiva. In 2021, they translated the book Black Noise: Rap Music and Black Culture in Contemporary America by American sociologist Tricia Rose into Portuguese. Originally published in 1994, the book was the result of pioneering research on the subject that was conducted in the USA. In 2023, they edited Racionais MC’s – Entre o gatilho e a tempestade (Racionais MC's – Between the trigger and the storm), a compilation of the studies and academic papers on the rap group that have been written in Brazil in recent years. “Through these publications, activities at universities, and dialogue with artists from the scene, we want to expand the field of study on hip-hop in the country,” says Lima Santos. Vieira Santos, from UEL, believes that studies need to delve deeper into issues such as female roles in the movement. The researcher notes, “Women have been involved in hip-hop from the very beginning. But they generally remain on the sidelines, and many are made invisible”.
Casa Sueli Carneiro provides access to documents on the history of hip-hop
Mano Brown receiving an honorary PhD (above) and graffiti by the São Paulo duo OSGEMEOS (right)
Arthur Dantas Rocha, author of the book Racionais MC’s – Sobrevivendo no inferno (Racionais MC's – Surviving in hell; Editora Cobogó, 2021), investigates how the group from São Paulo was received by the press and cultural sectors between the releases of the albums Raio X do Brasil and Sobrevivendo no inferno . Rocha states, “At the time, the records were already well-known and celebrated in poor urban areas, but elsewhere, there was a general distrust of rap, which was an undervalued musical genre”. He adds, “In fact, much of the discourse was clearly racist, with some wrongly stating that the members of Racionais MC’s were ex-convicts.” At the same time, he notes, artists such as Caetano Veloso and Chico Buarque highlighted the value of the group's work, in contrast to the views of the press.
The tone began to shift in the first decade of the 2000s due to various factors. One factor was that rap started to become more professional, with rappers such as Emicida opening production companies dedicated to their artistic careers. In postdoctoral research funded by FAPESP and completed at UNICAMP in 2019, Vieira dos Santos, from UEL, identified that the musical genre began to occupy a new social and symbolic position in society following this professionalization process, constituting what she called “the new condition of rap.” Sociologist Felipe Oliveira Campos reached a similar conclusion in his master's research, which was completed at USP's School of Arts, Sciences, and Humanities (EACH) in 2019. Campos notes, “In the 1990s, rap shows were known for their dangerous conditions and were often delayed for hours. The producers helped change this”. The 2022 documentary Racionais: Das ruas de São Paulo pro mundo (Racionais MC’s: From the streets of São Paulo to the world), which was directed by Juliana Vicente, addresses this topic. While completing his master's degree, Campos researched the São Bernardo do Campo Church Rap Battle. Created in 2013, this event takes place weekly in front of the city's central church, a place where workers held demonstrations during Brazil’s military dictatorship (1964–1985). More than a thousand people show up every week, many of whom are from municipalities in the São Paulo Metropolitan Area and who take part in rap battles and improvised rhyming.
Today, according to UFRJ’s Gutierrez, the rap music market is complex and multifaceted, covering everything from political to romantic music.
“Despite this range, the poetics of these songs share a common element, in that they chroni-
cle life on the street and in the neighborhoods where the artists live or grew up,” explains the researcher, who is now doing a postdoctoral fellowship in which he is investigating the rap market in Brazil, especially in Rio de Janeiro. The first rappers in the state were strongly influenced by Miami bass, a form of rap that originated in Florida, USA. He notes, “The musical style is good to dance to and has Latin elements. It arrived in Rio in the 1970s, where it encountered samba, Candomblé, and Umbanda, later giving rise to Funk carioca and the early seeds of the hip-hop scene”.
In Brazil, some researchers, such as psychologist Mônica Guimarães Teixeira do Amaral of USP’s School of Education, have used hip-hop as a pedagogical tool in schools. In research funded by FAPESP and completed in 2018, she found that many schools in São Paulo failed to comply with laws 10.639/03 and 11.645/08, which state that Afro-Brazilian and Indigenous history and culture must be taught in schools. In this study, Amaral developed methodologies and strategies through which educational institutions could implement the legislated topics. By encouraging intersections between school culture, expressions of hip-hop, and shared teaching between artists and teachers, this researcher suggests working with content on African history, in addition to Afro-Brazilian and urban cultures, in elementary school curricula.
Rapper Daniel Garnet, who has a degree in physical education and is now a PhD student at FE-USP, makes a similar recommendation. In his academic research, he created methodologies in which rap battles are used in pedagogical processes. Thus, in workshops given at USP, in public schools, and at Fundação Casa, he uses the musical genre to address verse metrics in poetry, rhymes, and figures of speech, in addition to teaching classes on the history of Africa and Brazil. Garnet concludes, “Rap battles and break dancing occupy a special place in the minds of young people, who like challenges and testing their limits. Furthermore, they represent a combination of the arts and education, which means they can help awaken a student’s interest in other school subjects”. n
The research projects, scientific articles, and books consulted for this report are listed in the online version.
Rapper performs at Batalha da Matriz in São Bernardo do Campo, São Paulo
POLITICAL
THE FAITH AND THE FISCAL
Worshippers at a service of the Assembleia de Deus (Assembly of God) church in Rio de Janeiro: the state is home to Brazil’s highest number of evangelical churches, alongside Espírito Santo
Brazilian Revenue Service data can be used to map a century of expansion by the evangelical church
Diego Viana
The primary source of information on the religious affiliations of the Brazilian population is the Demographic Census, which is conducted every 10 years by the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics (IBGE). However, this interval is too long for sociologists and other researchers of religion. The evangelical population in Brazil has grown rapidly since the 1960s, with Census data quickly becoming outdated.
“There is much talk about the evangelical population increasing in the country, but we don’t know exactly how this has been happening, nor where this growth began, for example,” notes Brazilian political scientist Victor Araújo of the UK’s University of Reading. He continues, “The Census is a snapshot, and we do not have dynamic data on what happens between these IBGE surveys.”
While 90% of Brazilians self-declared as Catholic during the 1960s, evangelicalism, with its different denominations, is set to become the country’s largest religious group by 2040. The phenomenon that Brazil is currently experiencing is known as “religious transition.” The same phenomenon was widespread in parts of Europe during the religious wars of the 16th and 17th centuries, but in Brazil, according to Araújo, the process may take less than 100 years.
To identify how evangelical churches are distributed across the country, Araújo drew on another source: data from the Brazilian Federal Revenue Service (SRF), which are available online. Since there are more than 152,000 religious establishments registered in Brazil, this political scientist has developed an algorithm in the programming language R that has open-source
code and is accessible to researchers and others interested in the topic.
This method enabled the detection and classification of temples registered with the SRF in line with IBGE census categories: missionaries, including typically older churches, such as Baptist, Presbyterian, and Methodist; Pentecostals, whose doctrine includes elements that the Missionaries do not, such as belief in miracles, and include Assembleia de Deus (Assembly of God), Congregação Cristã do Brasil (Christian Congregation of Brazil), and Deus é Amor (God is Love); and Neopentecostals, a group that emerged in Brazil at the end of the 1970s, focuses on the theology of prosperity and includes churches such as Universal do Reino de Deus (God’s Kingdom Universal), Sara Nossa Terra (Sara Our Earth), and Renascer em Cristo (Rebirth in Christ). Other churches are listed as “classification not determined.”
The results were published in the technical note “Emergence, trajectory, and expansion of evangelical churches in Brazil over the last century (1920–2019),” which was recently published by the University of São Paulo’s Center for Metropolitan Studies (CEM-USP), with which Araújo is associated in Brazil. The CEM is one of the Research, Innovation, and Dissemination Centers (RIDC) that are funded by FAPESP. “The survey provides researchers in this field with an additional datum because the IBGE Demographic Census says nothing about the creation of places of worship,” says sociologist Ricardo Mariano of USP’s School of Philosophy, Languages and Literature, and Human Sciences (FFLCH-USP).
Using this digital resource, the researcher mapped out Brazil’s religious transition background between 1920 and 2019. Araújo notes that
the legislation on churches has been amended several times, but the oldest record still active at the Federal Revenue Service is from 1922 and involves a Baptist church in Nova Iguaçu (Rio de Janeiro State). As expounded in the technical note, this does not mean that this was the first evangelical church inaugurated in Brazil. For example, historical records indicate the existence of a congregation of the Assembleia de Deus founded in 1911 in Belém (Pará State).
Following article 44 of the Civil Code, religious organizations in Brazil have had to hold a National Legal Entities’ (Corporate) Registration (CNPJ) since 2002, and this requirement is also provided for in Law no. 10.825/2003. “The legislation states that churches are private legal entities. Therefore, they must be registered with the Federal Revenue, and, in turn, the CNPJ, to enable them to open bank accounts and hire employees, for example,” says Armando Rovai, chair of the Special Business Advocacy Commission of the Brazilian Bar Council, São Paulo branch (OAB-SP). Created in 1998, the CNPJ system was preceded by the General Taxpayers’ Register (CGC), which was instituted in 1964.
Araújo sees this religious transition as “one of the most important demographic phenomena in modern Brazil.” The process gained pace mainly from the 1960s, with the urbanization and industrialization of the country. “When people
migrated to the new city limits, there were not yet Catholic parishes in place. The evangelicals were first to arrive in these locations because they could open their places of worship without having to apply to the Vatican, as the Catholics were obligated to do,” recalls the researcher, who authored the book A religião distrai os pobres? O voto econômico de joelhos para a moral e os bons costumes (Does religion distract the poor? The economic vote kneeling before morals and good habits) (Edições 70, 2022).
To date, the most urbanized regions are the most sizeable bastions of Brazilian evangelism. Among the Brazilian states, Espírito Santo and Rio de Janeiro have the highest number of evangelical churches—more than 80 per 100,000 inhabitants across both states. In other words, these locations have an evangelical church for every 1,250 residents, as revealed in the survey. Northeastern Brazil remains widely Catholic, although evangelicals predominate in state-capital metropolitan regions.
The anthropologist Ronaldo de Almeida, who is the coordinator of the Laboratory of Religious Anthropology at the University of Campinas (LAR-UNICAMP), says that Araújo’s plotting of these temples corroborates aspects that religious studies have been attempting to demonstrate in recent years. One of these aspects is the accelerated growth of evangelism in the 1980s, when the Census began indicating the presence of this group in the country more accurately.
Growth of evangelical churches in Brazil
Growth peaked between 2000 and 2016
Above: the Universal Church’s Temple of Solomon, in the São Paulo neighborhood of Brás
Another aspect is the territorial expansion of these churches that was revealed in the 2000 Census. “You can see the growth of evangelical churches in areas of recent immigration,” adds Almeida, also a researcher at the Brazilian Center for Analysis and Planning (CEBRAP). They continue, “The North and Midwest regions, frontiers of agricultural expansion in recent decades, received many farmers from the South, where the protestant presence is historically strong.”
The first churches that were set up, along with the migrants, were missionary in character, but in the last decade, Pentecostal and Neopentecostal churches have advanced more quickly, as exemplified by the northern state of Rondônia. According to the map’s ranking of states with the highest numbers of evangelical churches, Rondônia occupied third-to-last place in 1970 but began to feature among the top five in 2000. In 2019, Rondônia was home to 60 temples per 100,000 inhabitants and was one of the Brazilian states closest to completing the religious transition alongside Rio de Janeiro, Mato Grosso do Sul, and Espírito Santo. However, counting places of worship does not accurately demonstrate the numbers of these faithful in Brazil. After all, a chapel and a cathedral each have their own CNPJ registration, but their attendance capacities are incalculably different. Almeida notes, “As with all studies, there are limitations. It’s difficult to fathom the Brazilian evangelical expansion in the last century, but registration of temples is another variable that contributes to an insight into what has happened in Brazil over the course of this period”.
Furthermore, many churches operate clandestinely, with no CNPJ: a religious leader may, for example, hold services in the living room or garage of his or her house. As Mariano observes, “A lot of small congregations don’t feel obligated to formalize. Underreporting is considerable”. The survey does not include churches that opened during the period analyzed but, for some reason, were no longer active in 2019. Additionally, individuals can register church CNPJs for nonreligious purposes, but these are not identifiable in the SRF data, as Araújo warns.
Even so, the data corresponding to the Census years, such as 2000 and 2010, are aligned with the numbers published by the IBGE. Araújo notes, “For non-census years when comparison is not possible, it’s likely that the classification will be close to what it would be if the data were collected every year”.
For this political scientist, making the tool he developed available to other researchers is one of the aims of his study. He concludes, “Anyone with an intermediate knowledge of programming and a computer with standard processing capacity could replicate the procedures”. He plans to update the study as new data become available on the Federal Revenue Service website and to compare the results with the numbers to be published after the 2022 Census. n
Below: a small congregation in Rio de Janeiro; many do not register with the Federal Revenue
Many geometrical structures are hidden below canopies and are reappearing due to deforestation
HUMAN MARKS IN THE AMAZON
Cutting-edge technology was used to identify geoglyphs beneath the forest, and work with current indigenous peoples suggests the intentional generation of terra preta since pre-Columbian times
Letícia Naísa
It is hard to think of the Amazon rainforest and not imagine a vast expanse of green. It is home, however, to much more than can be seen from the sky. Giant geometrical figures hidden by canopies have been identified using the optical technology LIDAR (laser imaging detection and ranging), as an article published in October in the journal Science reported. In September, an article in Science Advances also provided more evidence that terra preta (literally meaning black soil and known as Amazonian dark earth), generally considered the work of pre-Columbian peoples, was intentional and not the result of chance.
Research carried out in the last three decades indicates that Brazil was already widely inhabited, including the Amazon region, prior to the arrival of Portuguese colonizers in 1500. The scale of this Amazonian occupation is now growing, based on mapping conducted with equipment fitted to drones or onboard aircrafts, which emits thousands of laser pulses per second and, with each pulse, calculates a measurement of distance.
“It is almost like a radiography,” explains geographer Vinicius Peripato, a PhD student at the National Institute for Space Research (INPE) and the lead author of the study coauthored by 230 researchers.
In already deforested areas in the western part of the Amazon, enormous geometrical figures, such as geoglyphs, can be observed, which are formed by ditches dug into the ground. With the use of the Google Earth tool and satellite imaging technology, these figures have been visible since the turn of the millennium. “It was possible to identify hundreds of these structures, especially in the west of the Amazon,” says biologist Luiz Aragão, head of the INPE's Earth Observation and
Geoinformatics Division, advisor to Peripato, and coordinator of the article published in Science.
In the last 20 years, excavations carried out by archaeologists have shown that the geometric forms are important religious sites (see Pesquisa FAPESP issue no. 186 ). Peripato and his colleagues knew of the existence of these traces of human occupation and thought that more of them may exist beneath the forest canopy. “Previous tests had indicated the possibility of the occurrence of these structures, but nothing precise,” he explains.
These authors developed a method to digitally remove the forest and improve the detection of aspects of relief—the resolution of the LIDAR sensing data was still not suitable for archaeological observations. The equipment covered 5,315 square kilometers (km²) of the Amazon, equivalent to 0.08% of the forest. “It worked, luckily we found 24 previously undiscovered structures,” celebrates Peripato.
With this discovery, the researcher developed a mathematical model to estimate how many other similar geoglyphs would be in the territory and where they would be, taking a series of still-unknown variables into account. He compared the data provided by the LIDAR sensor with information from 937 other known archaeological structures and, using this model, calculated that at least 10,272 still undiscovered pre-Columbian structures exist, possibly 23,648 in the entire forest—a territory of 6,700 km². The distribution of 53 species of domesticated plants used for food was mapped in previous forestry inventories and may serve as an indication of the existence of archaeological structures in the vastness of the Amazon.
The optical technology LIDAR enables layers below the forest, similar to radiography, revealing subtle variations in relief, such as the geoglyphs
“It was a study that required a multidisciplinary team and the use of cutting-edge technology to carry out,” assesses Aragão. The dating of the still-undiscovered geoglyphs was estimated based on the existing archaeological literature but can only be confirmed when excavation work is conducted and material is collected for analysis.
“It is an important article that confirms something that archaeologists have said for years: there were lots of people living in the Amazon in the past,” comments archaeologist Eduardo Góes Neves, of the Museum of Archaeology and Eth-
nology of the University of São Paulo (MAEUSP). “These peoples lived there, and they also modified the forest,” he states. Evidence of human presence in the region dates back approximately 12,000 years. For some of the experts, the Amazon is a biocultural heritage site that suffers influences from both nature and from the population that lived and still lives there.
Neves says that a large part of the still-preserved geoglyphs are on environmentally protected lands occupied by indigenous peoples.
“It is the indigenous peoples who preserve the structures in the midst of agribusiness advances and the destruction taking place in the Amazon,” he remarks. In his view, the indigenous peoples have been present in the area since ancient times and have contributed to the creation of the country's biomes. “You cannot separate their history from the history of Brazil.”
The terra preta found at various points in the Amazon is another sign of agricultural activity registered around the geoglyphs and has helped to shape the biomes. Made up of leftover foods, such as cassava and fish, ashes, and other organic waste from the forest, it is rich in nutrients such as phosphorous, calcium, magnesium and nitrogen, which are essential for cultivating food.
“When terra preta began to be studied, it was a revolution in Amazon archaeology: providing evidence of the existence of large populations on that land, because to form that material, it is necessary to have many people inhabit a place
With LIDAR and mathematical models, researchers have calculated that there are between 10,000 and 24,000 of these structures in the Amazon
for a long time,” states British archaeologist Jennifer Watling of the Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology of the University of São Paulo (MAEUSP) and coauthor of the article. Prior to these studies, the general understanding was that the Amazon rainforest could not support a very dense population due to a lack of fertile soil, she says. “The terra preta shows that it is possible to support many people without destroying the forest.”
The team collected more than 3,600 soil samples from four archaeological sites, two historic villages, one modern village in the Alto do Xingu region called Kuikuro II and several samples from the Alto Tapajós region and from the Carajás Mountains. The analyses revealed that the oldest samples were over 5,000 years old.
The dating of terra preta is one of the main controversies in recent studies on this type of soil. In 2021, an article in the journal Nature Communications questioned the anthropic origins of terra preta. “Based on elemental analysis, the data do not match with the presence of human beings in the Amazon,” states agricultural engineer Rodrigo Studart Corrêa, a specialist in the recovery of soils and a researcher from the University of Brasília (UnB). According to Corrêa’s study, the cultivation of Amazonian land dates back at least 4,500 years, although archaeological evidence points to practices of cultivation in the region dating back 9,000 years.
For the agricultural engineer's group, the terra preta they studied originated from sediments from the Andes mountain range. “This material is a river meander,” states Corrêa. According to him, based on the isotope analysis of strontium and other elements, a part of the composition of the samples does not come from organic matter. “The fragments of ceramic in these soils are a great mystery, but this could indicate that they were used to bury the dead, maybe because the soils were easy to excavate,” he speculates.
Watling and geographer and archaeologist Morgan Schmidt, from the Laboratory for Interdisciplinary Studies in Archaeology of the Federal University of Santa Catarina (UFSC), however, believe that their results refute this interpretation of an accidental formation of terra preta by local communities. The researchers conducted interviews with inhabitants, observed the daily life of the villages and observed that the residents deposited fish and cassava waste in trash cans as tall as 60 centimeters in height. “The majority of the terra preta forms in waste disposal areas, as if it were compost,” says Watling. “They mix the organic material with ash and charcoal to form a fertile soil and spread it on cultivation areas.”
Terra preta is rich in pyrogenic carbon, also called charcoal or biochar, which originates from the burning of organic material and is a source of nutrients for plants. The Science Advances study revealed that concentrations of carbon were two times greater in residential areas than in less occupied areas. This occurs because the indigenous peoples use ash from domestic fires for the production of terra preta, according to Schmidt, who has been studying the agricultural practices of Amazonian peoples for more than 20 years. Another advantage of this type of soil is the sequestration and storage of atmospheric carbon. The measurements indicate that approximately 4,500 tons of this element are present at one of the archaeological sites, while in the modern villages, 110 tons are present. This shows how, over time, the carbon has persisted and accumulated. However, climate change is a concern. “Carbon can decompose quicker due to the warming of the ground,” explains Schmidt. “We also saw that when there is deforestation in an area with terra preta and cultivation, the organic material is lost from the soil and the carbon returns to the atmosphere,” he points out.
The climate crisis could also affect the consumption habits of indigenous populations that still prepare terra preta on their lands. “This earth is created by means of a very particular way of using and managing the domestic space, which includes the disposal of leftover traditional foods such as cassava,” says Watling. “If they stop planting and consuming such foods, we do not know if the terra preta would still form in the same way.” n
A Kuikuro woman deposits ash from a fire in an area where terra preta develops
Above the forest
This ring of towers, designed to release carbon dioxide (CO2)-enriched air over a small area of the Amazon rainforest 80 kilometers north of Manaus, is nearing completion. The initiative is part of an experiment conducted by the AmazonFACE project in a reserve facilitated by the Brazilian National Institute of Amazonian Research (INPA) and will begin operating at the end of 2024, together with five other rings. The experiment will measure the physiological responses of the rainforest to predicted climate change conditions. Two large cranes beside each of the rings will be employed to study the canopy. “Seeing the rainforest from above is an indescribable experience, it brings tears to my eyes,” said David Lapola, an ecologist of the University of Campinas.
Image submitted by David Lapola from UNICAMP’s Earth System Science Laboratory
