Biological Megadiversity as a Tool of Soft Power and Development for Brazil

In this article, I provide a brief overview of the importance of biodiversity and its value for Brazil and for the world. This theme will be on the Brazilian and global agendas over the coming decades. In the case of Brazil, vast biological diversity is a clear resource for global influence and a valuable tool of soft power that, along with other resources, constitutes a hugely important asset for the country’s economic and social progress. I also briefly examine favorable [...]


Introduction: megadiversity as a distinguishing factor in Brazil
razil's international influence depends on the country's ability to accumulate resources for the exercise of soft power. In the 21 st century, with the spread of biotechnologies, biological diversity is one of Brazil's most valuable assets, alongside others associated with the institutionalization of the science and technology system and the construction of a global environmental agenda. Economic and social development based on an advanced bioindustry, in a positive and sustainable relationship with the protection of biodiversity, could stimulate the creation of techno-industrial hubs associated with the country's most biodiverse biomes, such as the Amazon, Cerrado and Atlantic Forest. This development depends to a large extent on quality education, science and technological capacity, as well as adequately addressing challenges of environmental management and effective governance. In this context, and considering resources of soft power and challenges, this article offers an overview of the theme of biodiversity within the global environmental agenda and its growing future relevance, examining the importance of this agenda for Brazil's development.
Brazil is the country with the greatest biological diversity in the world. It is one of seventeen countries regarded as megadiverse. Megadiverse countries have at least 5000 indigenous botanical species and a marine ecosystem on their coasts. According to Conservation International, 70% of the world's flora and fauna are found in these seventeen countries, which occupy only around 10% of the earth's surface. Brazil is the most megadiverse of the seventeen. It has the greatest land biological diversity (flora and fauna), while Indonesia has the greatest marine biological diversity. Recent estimates are that the animal and plant species currently known in the country (there is an incalculable number of species not yet discovered, mainly in the Amazon -on average, 700 new species are discovered every year) represent 15% to 20% of global biological diversity. Other natural resources contributing to Brazil's megadiversity include: 20% of the world's drinking water; the largest continuous area of mangroves (1.3 million hectares); and the only coral environment in the South Atlantic, stretching for 3000 km along the country's northeastern coast.

Sérgio Abranches
(2020) 14 (2) e0006 -3/18 The country contains two of the world's 34 biodiversity 'hotspots': the Atlantic rainforest and the Cerrado. A hotspot of biological diversity is a biogeographic region with a great diversity of flora and fauna that is at risk of extinction. These 34 areas previously covered around 16% of the Earth's surface and 86% of its habitats have already been destroyed. Today they cover only 2% of the earth's surface, but 50% of vascular plants and 42% of existing vertebrates are indigenous to these hotspots.
Brazil is also a country of great social and cultural diversity, with almost promote the preservation of biodiversity and sustainable use of genetic and biological resources. These resources will be fundamental to providing Brazil with the capacity to enter the fourth industrial age competitively, as a major pole of biotechnology and bioindustry. Biodiversity is a highly valuable resource, because of the environmental services it provides, the opportunities it presents for sustainable use, and as the basis for another model of progress, that is more compatible with the needs of the 21st century.

Brazilian soft power
Brazil has never had sufficient military and economic power to use as a resource in the international arena. But it has always had influence in world diplomacy. This is explained by the resources of soft power that the country has been able to develop and exploit.

Destruction of biodiversity and climate change as limits to development
During the final decade of the twentieth century, environmental issues, particularly linked to the destruction of biodiversity and climate -especially global warming caused by human activity -, became increasingly central to global politics.
These themes were initially addressed by the Club of Rome, which created the first transdisciplinary network of scientists dedicated to the study of their evolution, impacts and implications for public policies. The study 'Limits to Growth' (Meadows, Meadows, Randers and Behrens III, 1972), a seminal work led by Donnela and Dennis Meadows, both from the system dynamics group coordinated by Jay Forrester at MIT, used system dynamics in an innovative way, as a method, logical structure and language. The software used to produce the simulations was an experimental version of a program designed by Jay Forrester that conducted simultaneous equations, organized systematically. Integrating demographic, economic and geological data, among others, it sought to assess the viability of maintaining the same pattern of economic growth over the subsequent 30 years.
The results of 'Limits to Growth' alerted the world to the possibility that development could reach a point of exhaustion. The Club of Rome report

Brazil in the global policy of biological diversity and climate
It was no coincidence that Brazil hosted the first and most important global summit on biological diversity and climate. We had the advantage of being a middleincome country with a professional diplomatic corps with a strong reputation, a  scientists. It introduced the idea of carbon credits, which allowed countries to develop projects to reduce carbon emissions and, with them, obtain certificates that could be used towards their emission reduction targets. Brazilian diplomacy and scientists who contributed to the development of this mechanism also played a decisive role in negotiations for it to be officially adopted. In 2012, Rio was host to Rio+20, the summit that proposed the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). The SDGs were complex, they comprised 17 Sustainable Development Goals, and 169    and unemployed populations. They use poverty as a shield by using a frontline of land-grabbers and deforesters formed by poor squatters, as a fence around their irregular properties, to avoid eviction by the police. This is a billionaire business.
Deforestation of large areas requires significant capital in the form of tractors, trucks and winches. Large-scale deforestation is associated with a network of economic interests that range from the use of armed groups to intimidate and kill, to smuggling, to the irregular production of soy and cattle, to export agriculture, the industrialization and export of soy, both for food and animal feed. The prevention, A key point is that biodiversity as a resource of soft power can, when associated with other soft power resources such as science and technology, create Part of a country's accumulation of soft power is related to its legitimacy on the international stage. The quality of diplomacy and the observance of international agreements are necessary, but not sufficient conditions. The wellbeing of the population and the quality of democracy are also important assets for legitimation. In order for Brazil to realize the soft power potential of its biological diversity, good environmental governance is needed to achieve zero deforestation and establish the minimum level of legal-political protection and social stability, which are essential for the sustainable development of biodiversity. It also necessarily involves reducing inequalities and poverty, in order to reduce pressure on the rainforest frontier. Wide and equal access to quality education will allow for the development of the human component of biodiversity and the formation of a qualified workforce at all levels of the science-technology-production chain. With this base of biodiversity protected and a society able to take advantage, our comparative and competitive advantages to develop a low carbon economy will increase exponentially (BALAT and BALAT, 2009).
In addition to biological diversity, which can al so play an important role in the local production of sustainable biomass energy, our wind and solar potential is unparalleled. We have the resources to competitively develop the hydrogen economy, the most plausible candidate to replace the current oil-based

The pandemic as an effect of poor environmental management
The SARS-COV-2 pandemic confirmed the predictions of environmental and epidemiological research that pointed to the probability of the migration of viruses from the wild fauna to the human organism, due to an unhealthy relationship between humans and the natural world. In addition to being invisible, the virus causes a disease that has a long incubation period, between 07 and 14 days, without symptoms or with symptoms so mild that they may go unnoticed. Hence the severe threat it represents. Infected people transmit the virus without being aware of it, on a geometric scale. Because of these characteristics, it quickly became a global pandemic. The disease spread rapidly through a globalized world. It emerged, most likely, in China, in Wuhan, the capital of Hubei province. At a seafood market fish mingled with illegally procured meat and live wild animals.
The coronavirus is present in common bats or pangolins (manis javanica), which are illegally imported into Guangdong province. Upon entering the human body, it undergoes adaptive mutation (natural selection) that transforms it into a highly infectious and quite lethal virus. The specific origin is still a mystery. We know almost nothing about this new type of coronavirus, which has been named SARS-COV-2, and even less about the disease it causes, a severe and acute respiratory syndrome (SARS), known as COVID-19. People react to it in such varied ways that we are not yet able to detect patterns. We lack sufficient data and adequate research.
Knowledge that we will only have after the pandemic has subsided completely and become another 'influenza' that reappears annually in outbreaks of varying severity.
It is not a mystery, however, what it was allowed it to migrate to the human organism. It was the inadequate management of nature, the reckless invasion of the natural environment by the human environment. The economic impact was almost immediate. When the disease began to spread through Wuhan, the government closed down the entire province. Hubei is one of the most important regions in the world for the production of electronics. The world economy depends on globalized supply chains and several of them are highly concentrated in hubs in China, which supply parts and components, and where final products are assembled.
The total halt to production in the province of Hubei brought a sudden interruption to various sectors of the world economy, including in the United States and The use of masks was recommended after a certain point, but they quickly became scarce even for health personnel, among whom rates of infection and death have been very high. There was also a lack of ventilators worldwide for patients who required mechanical assistance to breathe during the most severe phase of COVID-19. The health consequences are devastating. The severity of the pandemic is associated with the quality of governance. Poor governance is associated with higher severity of the COVID-19 crisis. Several non-epidemiological factors affect the natural dynamics of the disease and quality of governance appears to be one of them.
Political science has consistently demonstrated that good democratic governance makes a difference to the stability of democracy and also to the effectiveness of public policies. Upon entering the human body, the virus undergoes adaptive mutation (natural selection) that turns it into a highly infectious and lethal agent.
The health and human consequences of the pandemic are devastating, as are its side effects on the economy, social life and politics.

The pandemic and quality of governance
Pandemics like this show how the quality of democratic governance and the robustness of public health care facilities and social protection networks are negatively correlated with the severity of contagion and mortality rates.
Germany, which has a universal health protection system and a strong scientific and personnel to function. For these reasons, the performance of these two countries in controlling the pandemic has been disastrous. The United States, mainly due to the efforts of state governments, which enjoy far greater technical and financial autonomy than their Brazilian counterparts, seems to have finally managed to reduce the contagion and death curves. The Brazilian case remains out of control, despite the efforts of state governments, which won control of local health decisions thanks to a decision by the Supreme Court. The fe deral government failed to act and the Ministry of Health has been neutralized, with the dismissal of two qualified ministers and the militarization of ministerial and departmental staff, on an interim basis, which has rendered it passive and directionless, unable to offer strategic coordination of the response to the pandemic or generate essential resources for state and municipal health services. Brazil has failed to test the population to accurately measure the spread of the contagion, the number of cases and the number of deaths resulting from COVID-19. The country is proceeding through the pandemic without a compass, without knowing exactly the scale of the problem it is facing. The failure of Brazilian governance during the pandemic also revealed absolute contempt by the federal government for science and for the country's excellent medical research system, which could have been a valuable asset in facing this challenge.

Conclusion
I consider these issues part of the transition into the 21st century, given the environmental and climatic limits as well as the new structural and technological possibilities it presents, which pose new dilemmas for collective action and global governance. Historical evidence suggests that humanity is able to take precautions for risks and traumas that have recent and very serious precedents, but fail to take precautions with unknown, unprecedented risks, even when they are predicted by science, regardless of the degree of potential danger involved.
This is an important issue that requires detailed theoretical reflection, moral philosophy and more empirical, historical and contemporary research, because this is the type of risk that is being predicted with significant degrees of probability, for the coming decades, primarily driven by environmental or climaterelated factors. Among the dangers identified by science, there are also unpredictable, unprecedented and unknown ones (as SARS -COV-02 was, and, to a large extent, still is). Beyond these, there are those that are unpredictable and unknown, but about which we can estimate probabilities based on changes in the physical and human environment and collective behavior in producing, reacting to and adapting to these changes. These are questions at the frontiers of scientific knowledge, not only in the natural sciences, but also the social and behavioral sciences. The lack of studies exploring these new areas leaves humanity less equipped to deal with the transition that will unfold over the next century. The world will, inexorably, enter new patterns of technical organization, production, energy use and territorial occupation. Having timely knowledge at different moments of this transition, in all spheres of human knowledge, is an essential task for collective global well-being and for the future of democracy in the world Translated by Matthew Richmond Submitted on May 21,2020 Accepted on June 17, 2020