Mining companies compensate Brazil with 30 billion dollars for environmental disaster in 2015

Afp and Ap

La Jornada Newspaper
Saturday, October 26, 2024, p. 20

Brasilia. After three years of negotiations, Brazilian authorities yesterday signed a compensation agreement with the mining companies Vale and BHP, worth almost 30 billion dollars, for the collapse in 2015 of a dam in the city of Mariana, which caused the worst environmental disaster in the history of the country.

I hope the mining companies have learned a lesson: it would have been much cheaper to avoid what happened. Infinitely cheaperstated President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva.

The accident caused a gigantic mudslide that killed 19 people and seriously contaminated the Doce River, a situation that compromised the tributary until its mouth into the Atlantic Ocean.

Separately, this year’s wildfires in Brazil devastated an area the size of Switzerland, a level of destruction that will take decades to recover from, according to a new satellite assessment.

The data is exceptionally alarming. It is a very abrupt increasesaid Ane Alencar, scientific director of the Amazon Environmental Research Institute (IPAM), a Brazilian non-profit organization.

The area that burned between January and mid-October 2024 represents an increase of 846 percent compared to the same period in 2023, five times more extensive than the forest fires of 2019. This estimate comes from the National Institute for Space Research of Brazil , which tracks the official rate of deforestation in that country.