The agreement with the IMF and the tapir against climate change

What does the agreement with the IMF have to do with the service provided by the tapir against climate change? One possible answer arises from the relationship between sustainable finance and the dispersal of seeds that tapirs carry out in certain degraded areas. Let's see.

Law 27,668 was recently enacted, which approved the public credit operations contained in the Extended Facilities Programme to be held between the Executive Branch and the IMF. The new rule provided for budgetary support, but it had no impact on the memorandum on economic and financial policies, as originally proposed by the draft sent by the president.

However, only one issue can be rescued from that memorandum, which is the executive policy potential to strengthen the preparedness and address the challenges of climate change, and to promote sustainable finance.

In a context in which South America, according to the latest report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), is categorized as one of the areas most vulnerable to the effects of climate change, it is auspicious that governments promote sustainable finance, which is the result of introducing any financial decision environmental, social and governance criteria.

But promoting sustainable finance by expanding, for instance, financing with an environmental perspective is only the initial step or a simple declaration of interest. Effective and efficient results require the responsible willingness of each policymaker to effectively implement actions aimed at mitigating the causes and consequences of the climate crisis. Otherwise, budgetary allocations are likely to be allocated to other areas or progressively diminish (e.g. native forest law) or, ultimately, climate incentives will be postponed.

The tapir is the largest herbivorous mammal in South America, can weigh up to 300 kilograms and has the ability to travel long distances, moving, in just one day, over a radius of up to 20 kilometers.

These factors—size and distance—contribute to the essential service it offers to the environment: regenerating large areas by dispersing seeds, which over time become trees which support critical ecosystem functions, such as maintaining carbon stocks. In this way, thanks to the dispersal of seeds, which eventually become large trees, frugivores contribute indirectly to maintaining the planet's carbon sinks.

There are two examples that illustrate this extraordinary process.

Research conducted in the Amazon forests of Brazil has shown that lowland tapirs facilitate seed dispersal especially in areas degraded by fire, fragmentation or extreme weather events. The records suggest, for researchers, that tapirs used burned forests twice as often as undisturbed closed canopy forests.

They suspect that this preference for degraded forests is related to the fact that open areas are warmer, allow greater light penetration and tend to have a higher proportion of palatable plants from the early stages of regrowth.

Therefore, by dispersing seeds through large areas of disturbed forests, and very often, tapirs effectively favor plant regeneration. In addition, dispersal contributes to the subsistence of carbon reserves because the seeds eventually become large trees, that is, deposits that capture carbon dioxide present in the atmosphere.

The second process takes place in Central Africa with forest elephants. Distinguished biologists documented that elephants traverse the jungle in search of food and thinned young trees that compete for space, water and light: they step on some and consume others. In this way, “the trees that remain standing have a huge advantage over others. Thanks to the thinning that elephants do, they have access to more water and light, which means they grow larger than the rest of the trees in the forest. Where elephants pass, they leave larger and taller trees,” they point out.

The consequence, as in the case of the tapir, is wonderful: “These trees, which biologists call late succession, store more carbon than the trees that would have grown and predominated in the forest canopy without the elephants. Thus, by tilting the biological balance in favor of one type of tree, elephants increase the level of carbon stored in the forest.”

In short, tapirs and elephants are true forest gardeners who fight against climate change, since with their respective services they help restore and conserve vegetation and, for that reason, they also cooperate with increasing the rate of carbon capture.

A good example to demonstrate the relationship between public external debt and climate change is the debt-for-environmental swap, which is typically an agreement to reduce the debt burden of a sovereign country in exchange for it to make some commitment related to the environment.

In our case, debt relief could be determined by the ecosystem service that tapir provides in the restoration of the forest and the consequent creation of carbon reserves for the planet. In this way, the savings could be used to finance, in local currency, the conservation of tapirs that are vulnerable to extinction. Of course, domestic investment must be compatible with the inflationary variable.

Thus, the articulation shows, at least, two issues. First, that valuing ecosystem goods and services, such as the one performed by tapir, allows sustainable finance to be promoted, even generating a virtuous circle between external debt and climate change. Secondly, without an effective and efficient managerial capacity, of its structural nature, goals and commitments come to naught.

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