Indigenous Wisdom and Scientific Innovation in Brazil for Global Sustainability

Atmospheric Tales: Season 5 / Episode 1

Marcia Barbosa (Guest), Beatriz Araújo (Interviewer), Shahzad Gani (Host)

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Shahzad G: Welcome to Atmospheric Tales, a podcast that amplifies stories and experiences related to air pollution and climate change, from around the world.

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Shahzad G: I’m your host, Shahzad Gani, and welcome to another episode of Atmospheric Tales.

Our guest today is Prof. Marcia Barbosa, who is a Professor of Physics at the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul (UFRGS), member of the Brazilian Academy of Sciences, and the World Academy of Sciences. Since 2023, she has been Secretary of Strategic Policy and Programs (SEPPE) at the Brazilian Ministry of Science, Technology and Innovation (MCTI). She has been awarded several academic awards, including the Loreal-UNESCO Women in Physical Sciences in 2013, for her scientific research using water anomalies under confinement and nanoscience to create new ideas for desalination and produce drinkable water. She also studies gender inequity in the academy, and how equity is an instrument of efficiency.

Our interviewer today is Beatriz Araújo, a climate expert, lawyer and consultant, holding a Master of Public Policy degree from the University of Oxford. She started her journey in the climate field as a researcher and activist back in 2013, when she co-ordinated the first Brazilian youth delegation to attend the UNFCCC COP, with the NGO Engajamundo. She then co-founded a social environmental protection NGO aimed at bridging the international climate change agenda with local issues, working alongside with indigenous peoples and traditional communities. Currently, Beatriz acts as an independent consultant, developing projects with governments, businesses and civil society, on subjects such as climate finance, just transitions, and innovation. She also serves as the President of the Environmental Law Commission of the Bar Association of the state of Ceara, and as a counselor of the State of Ceara Environmental Council.

Welcome to the show, Marcia and Beatriz!

Beatriz A: Thank you, Shahzad, and also, thank you, Prof. Marcia.

Marcia B: Hello, thank you for the invitation, Shahzad and Beatriz.

Beatriz A: It is such a pleasure to be your interviewer for today. I know that you have a very important role in the Brazilian government right now, with science and technology, so it’s really an honour to be able to ask you some questions.

Marcia B: Thank you.

Beatriz A: So, Brazil plays a pivotal role in confronting the challenges and embracing the opportunities presented by the climate change crisis. As the world’s sixth largest emitter, according to Climate Watch data, our emissions predominantly come from deforestation in the Amazon rainforest, despite our reputation for a clean energy matrix. As we face the imperative of reducing deforestation and restoring our biomes, we also face the opportunities offered by renewable energies and the inherent value of our traditional knowledge in biodiversity. So, in your capacity as both a scientist and a government leader, how do you envision Brazil harnessing these opportunities to foster sustainable development within our national economy?

Marcia B: Beatriz, we have a huge challenge. The first challenge is to reduce deforestation, and I don’t think that’s a trivial thing, because we have a huge forest. So we use technology, use satellite technology to monitor where we are having deforestation, to attack those areas. But there are areas in which in Brazil, this deforestation is legal. And in those areas, people are cutting the trees to plant food, and that’s not against the law. So how do you handle this? The only way to handle this part of this deforestation that is legal, because people are planting food, not only for Brazilians to eat, but for the whole world to eat, is to try to create an agriculture of low carbon; and that’s a huge challenge because it requires understanding our own agriculture and bringing up technology. So that’s one important issue. There is a second important issue, that I think in the world people are not looking at carefully — that’s the fact that we need to replace the whole production matrix based in oil. What do I mean? Look around yourself. You listen to us, look around yourself. You are going to see a number of things — chairs, computers, toys, plates that are manufactured using oil, using plastic, using oil technology. We have to replace it. Zero carbon means zero digging for oil. So we need to replace it by something else. One way to go, my favorite way to go, is to translate all these chemicals to biology — synthetic biology — means, using the mechanism that biology creates to replace the things that we use every day. And that is something that’s a challenge for anybody, for everybody, but it’s an opportunity for countries like Brazil that have this huge biodiversity. So, two ways to go — low carbon in the agriculture, stopping cutting the trees when you can, and also looking for new ways to make the production not oil-based anymore.

Beatriz A: Yeah, in this, in both ways, right, we will need a lot of new technologies. And my second question on this topic would be, do you foresee the creation of national technologies that enhance our independence while also facilitating the transfer of knowledge to aid other nations in addressing the climate crisis?

Marcia B: One thing that is already happening in Brazil, is that we are progressing in the second-generation ethanol. Brazil, at the beginning of the ethanol, was big on it. But what we were doing in the first generation of ethanol, we were using in a very inefficient way the crop; now in the second generation, we are using in a more efficient way the crops, the waste from our food production, and we are enhancing it thanks to what they call the synthetic biology. We realized that some of the enzymes present in the intestine of some animals in Brazil, they were able to digest cellulose. So we are using this enzyme to the second generation ethanol production. So we are already going to this end, and I think this is something ready to go, ready to pack, that you can proceed. But there is a second opportunity that we have to realize. We know very little about the biodiversity of Amazon and Cerrado, the two most difficult regions to access in Brazil; and this biotechnology, this biodiversity can help us to design new ways to produce goods for the country. We have to change our ways to make, instead of having this huge production of food that we have now that had a high carbon release, we can generate it in small communities; and we are doing that at the Ministry of Science and Technology, by going to these areas and trying to improve their production. Let me give you an example; there is an animal, a fish in the Amazon, that grows 12 kilos in the first year of its stage of life. This animal, it grows fast and we have to understand how this animal can do that, what the biology is behind that, so we can then create a fast way to produce food for the country. At the same time, we go to the community, you help the community to create goods and create production and have a better, more sanitary way to produce this pirarucu, that’s the name of the fish. We can learn from the fish, learn from the biodiversity to create more things, to scale up this knowledge. So it’s a two-way goal — let’s do something different from what the Northern Hemisphere is doing, let’s do different types of foods than the Northern Hemisphere is doing; let’s create a new path for food we design in a way of low-carbon emission.

Beatriz A: Thank you, Professor. It’s so amazing the kind of knowledge that we have based here in Brazil, and that could help solve the climate crisis as a whole out there in the world, right? So going to our second theme, which is climate negotiations, we know that Brazilian diplomacy is well recognized for playing a leading role in climate negotiations. So historically, the country has been a great defender of the common but differentiated responsibilities concept, for instance, and has greatly contributed to solving the climate crisis problem by reducing deforestation in the Amazon rainforest, as you have already mentioned, and creating the first-ever results-paying mechanism to reduce deforestation, which is the Amazon Fund, which served as an example to the international community. And after a short break in ambition in previous governments, Brazil is coming back now, updating its NDC and internal climate policy. How do you view the Brazilian contribution in the international scenario, and what role do you think we have to play in climate negotiations?

Marcia B: I think the Amazon Fund is a very important progress because it means that the world wants the Amazon to be surviving and is contributing for it. But, I think the world sometimes wants to understand the locals, what is happening there. So, the Ministry of Science, Technology, and Innovation, came together with one institute called Mamirauá, that is located in the center, in the core of the Amazon — it created a device in which this device can be put in the trees, and collect by taping sounds and images of the vision. This is already set up, this already exists. What is our dream and if this is dream, I think we are going to engage everybody in the planet, in the protection of the forest. I want to put regions, large regions, the regions where the indigenous peoples are living, I want to put them online, it means that I need thousands of these devices, and I need stationary satellites to tape it. So when you are in your home, in any place of the planet, and you want to check a specific tree, the tree that will have the device, will have a QR code, you can see what the tree is seeing, you can listen what it is like being around the trees. And if, for some instance, you get a passion with a certain type of bird or like me, I am in love with monkeys, you can select the frequency that you love and you can hear every day your favorite bird or monkey. Also, you will be a guardian of people cutting the trees, people putting fire in the forest; so, it’s like a forest online. I know this is a big dream, it’s costly, but we are discussing that with the training here in the Ministry of Science and Technology, together with the Ministry of Environment, together with the Ministry of Indigenous Peoples. Last week, we are in the locals, one of those areas with people from the Ministry of Indigenous Peoples, because we have a project together with them to develop an indigenous center of research in which they are the protagonists, they are running the show; and they got really motivated in that. We need to show the force. So this is giving back to the world what the efforts we are doing. But also, Brazil has to become even more — now that we are going next year to receive the COP in Belém — we need to push harder to the commitment that the world has to make globally for the South, because it’s very easy. I was just in a meeting with a number of Europeans discussing how they are going to use high-tech to decrease emissions in a, you know, very high-tech style, and I said, you are tempted to reform an old house, meaning that you are putting a lot of technology to decrease the carbon emission, but you’re not changing the way of life. We need to start discussing a change of way of life in the sense of changing the way you produce energy, changing the way we clean water, changing the way we build our cities, we build our companies — we have to bring new way of thinking because only reforming the old way will not get to zero emission.

Beatriz A: Yeah, and Brazil also plays a huge role in showing what other ways are possible, right, with our indigenous peoples and local communities and traditional ways of living. I think this really shines a light on what we’re trying to say, so it just doesn’t become an empty speech, but we can show from experience, right? That we have this going on here in our country.

Marcia B: Yes, let me give you an example. A few weeks ago I was discussing with some people from Europe that one breakthrough anybody in material science realized that we need to do, is the transition for hard materials to biological materials; they call that artificial life. Anybody knows that we have to do that. However, If you are in a country in which you rely strongly in a traditional chemical industry type, and that’s the case of Germany, Holland, France, it’ll be very difficult for those countries to say, we are going to abandon the traditional methodology to handle materials with chemicals, and change that to biological systems. It’s hard. So which countries will be the countries that will have the chance, the opportunity to do it, are the countries in which the chemical industry is not greatly developed, and all those countries are in the South. So, in the global South. So, as global Southers , I think many countries have to start to work together to follow those breakthroughs, to start to think that getting developed doesn’t mean to copy and paste the methodology that countries in Europe or United States have designed in the past, because those methodologies were the methodologies that trashed all the planet. So we need to redesign what means development. We have to redesign what means industrial production, from the start. And we are in a privileged point for doing that because we are in a point in which you don’t have this push from the old industry because they are still, they’re very small. So I’m optimistic that if you bind together two BRICS, for example, those countries, we will able to make a transition, what they call in physics a phase transition, like water to ice or water to gas, huge transition from a way of living in which you are based in oil, you’re based in and producing CO2, to something very different. And by being different, I think we can commit ourselves to be more equal too.

Beatriz A: Yeah, that’s amazing. It’s a huge challenge, but I think that we have incredible people like yourself who are in the position to really push for these agendas and to make sure that our country becomes less dependent on these kinds of technologies that have, as you said, trashed the planet, and go all the way to the other side to promote cleaner technologies, right, as you were explaining the biological ones. And that is also very related to a topic that we have already discussed, which is biodiversity. And also, something that we have decided to talk about, which is the indigenous knowledges and traditional knowledges here in Brazil. So, moving on to our next theme, Brazil has a large population of indigenous people with 1.5 million people who are part of more than 260 peoples from different ethnic groups, such as the Guarani, Macuxi and Yanomami. The ethnic and linguistic diversity of Brazil’s indigenous peoples is of great importance for maintaining the country’s cultural plurality. However, for many years, Indigenous peoples were persecuted and their culture was silenced. Fortunately, this tide has been shifting in recent years, with Indigenous voices having more visibility, especially when related to the climate agenda. Prof. Marcia, how does the knowledge of indigenous peoples here in Brazil dialogue with the environmental and climate issues we’re talking about? And in which ways can we, as non-Indigenous Brazilians, act to value and support Indigenous ways of knowing?

Marcia B: Yeah, let me start by giving you something that we just recently learned learn about, okay, that science has learned about. For many, many years, people thought the Amazon forest was like a random forest, that suddenly, nature created the forest. But actually, more and more evidence shows that that was a planted forest. So, the indigenous people, people that lived there for ages, were creating like a huge garden, you know, were creating this forest with their knowledge. So we realise, in the end, it’s not one knowledge because there are many different types of people who live in this area. So we realise, wow, that’s an important thing; it’s important to have a dialogue with this habitat, okay? But we have to be careful because for ages what we know indigenous people did, and we’re still doing, is that to go there and you try to bring our way to engage, our way to make science, our way to live, and transform and erase their way. So, one project that we are doing now with the indigenous people, is that we are going to fund a network of them. We have limited funding, so we are discussing with all those peoples, all those different groups, so they will select a couple of them and they will create a centre of knowledge, of their knowledge; they will select which knowledge, and how it is going to be built, and we are going to agree their resources, and we’re going to follow what is going on, to learn if this initiative can be scaled up. It’s a huge challenge because there are many different languages, many different cultures, many different attitudes. However, it’s very exciting. I can tell you one thing, in this travel, I was with André Baniwa, Baniwa is one of those tribes, and we are talking about education; how do you educate the kid? Okay, so what they do is that they ask to the kids, what they want to learn about, and starting from the interest of the kids, they bring their knowledge or the combination of their knowledge with what we know, and they design classes in which the kids interact with this knowledge. For instance, if the kids have decided they want to learn about rain, they will look at the rain, to the process — hands-on. I start to smile when he started explaining that because actually, these same methodologies in our, you know, my education, receive names — we call that hands-on — and receive also literature by the main educators of the world, saying that you have to have the education start from the desire of the people that are to be educated. So it’s fascinating, how even though different, even though coming from history that’s so far apart, some things we are going to figure out in this process, that are the same. At some point — I’m a specialist in water — so, when at some point we start to discuss about water, I want to understand how their future looks to water, what I look to water. And, he asked me, Prof. Marcia, from where all the water in the planet, came? In my culture, we never had an explanation for that. And I said, in my culture, we are still looking for the answers to that. There are many hypotheses, and the scientists are discussing which hypothesis; some say it came from outside Earth, which was hit by different bodies and water was released, and some say it’s from the inner side of the planet. But, it is fascinating how the questions are so human. The basic knowledge is always coming from a humanistic point of view. So, I’m very excited about this project because I can envision it as a pilot, that can create bridges between different types of knowledge.

Beatriz A: It’s fascinating, right, how somehow all of us as humans end up asking the same questions and sometimes even finding the same answers and being able to exchange that is really something that can change the game when it comes to climate change. Because as you were explaining, I had no idea that the Amazon rainforest was also planted. So if it was planted back then in the beginning, we can replant it now, right? We can fix the problem with this traditional knowledge and working alongside with indigenous peoples. So that’s so amazing. And also talking a little bit about your work with water. We know that Brazil is a rich country in water and we are estimated to have about 12% of the world’s surface water resources. But we also know that this water is unevenly distributed across the country, and we still have over 33 million Brazilians lacking access to water. So I wanted to ask you a few questions about that. What role does science and technology play in resolving water scarcity and what are viable solutions in the Brazilian context? And also, can these solutions be applied to other regions of the planet?

Marcia B: Yes, let me start with the uneven distribution of water in Brazil. We have regions in Brazil that, thanks to climate change, are going to become deserts. For those regions, there is one solution for survival, that is digging wells, because we still have a reasonable distribution of underneath water. However in many parts, this water is brackish water, means that they are salty water. So, what’s the solution for that? We are going to imagine desalination plants. However, the natural process that you can see in different countries are these huge desalination plants that you have in California, and you have in many Arab countries. But the way we have to go is to create these small desalination devices, and that is not something futuristic. I worked in, I am a theoretical physicist, so we designed more than ten years ago, a process with nano-graphene, means nano-materials, which separate water from salt. And now, the University of Buenos Aires is already producing it, small-scale home desalination filters for using at home; that means that it would be possible to have them in small regions, small communities, in those areas in which we have desertification. Another type of solution we have to envision is how to clean the water; because even though we have the water, the water most of the time is contaminated. Even the aquifers; aquifer is like an ocean underneath the ground, and we have a big one in the South of Brazil, it goes through three or four states; it’s already contaminated by the agriculture, so we need to clean it up. So, it’s also an opportunity to create a future for water. Even in the Amazon, the rivers don’t contain clean water; we need to create ways to clean this water, but not a big-scale way, but a small-scale way; and there are a number of devices that are being developed in the country that we are using for that. And I imagine that in other areas of the planet, in which the solution has to be a small-scale solution, the same devices that we are developing here, can be used elsewhere.

Beatriz A: And also, Brazil plays also an important role in developing these technologies and also transferring these technologies, right, to other countries that could receive them. And moving on to our final theme, it’s been such a pleasure to be talking to you. But when it comes to being a woman in science and technology, we know that you occupy a very high strategic position in the ministry, and you have been yourself dedicated to studying gender diversity and women in leadership positions in academia. So addressing issues such as productivity, harassment, misogyny, etc. So what do you think are the main barriers that women face in reaching senior positions during their career?

Marcia B: The first thing we need to realize is that when you are educating a small kid, you have to treat them with equity. And I get very irritated when I see a girl that is doing a wonderful job at school and people call her hard-working. But when it is a boy, he is called intelligent. You know, because our society gives a different prize, a different value for intelligent people than for hardworking people. So, we have to be fair, either we call both hardworking, or we call both intelligent. So, this is the first barrier; we are convinced that we are not intelligent. There are studies that show that by seven years of age, kids already think that men are intelligent, and women are hard-working; so we have to fix that. The second fix that we have to do, is that we have to stimulate the girls to be whatever they want. And the percentage of women going to hard science, engineering, is very small. That means that those fields are contaminated with a certain vision. You know, science has no gender; but the people doing science, when they have gender, they bring ideas that are based on their own lives; and we need to have more gender balance. Again, there are numerous studies that show that by having a diversity in the environment, this environment becomes more efficient. But there is another issue that’s true in every single field; it is the fact that when a woman is growing in her career, the strategy use to push her down, push her away, is harassment; many types of harassment, not only sexual harassment, but moral harassment. Calling her names, calling her this/that, talking about her clothes, the way she’s moving, instead of talking about her work. And also, using that she’s a woman, to undermine the things she was doing; we need to battle against this. It’s very important to have ethical rules in every sector of our society, and push those rules as hard as possible. And you might think, Marcia, you’re already…I don’t call myself old, but I call myself young for many years. So I have been young for many years; what that means is that I’m at a point in my life, where you might imagine that I’m not suffering anymore, from any type of harassment — that’s not true. Even yesterday, in the middle of a discussion that had nothing to do with gender, someone brought up that I was just saying this and this and this, because I want to bring a gender perspective to a discussion that has no gender perspective. So, there is no moment of peace but we are going to work hard, and we are going to change this, to have a more equitable society, and with that, a more efficient society.

Beatriz A: Thank you so much, Professor Marcia, for coming to our show and for all these amazing insights, especially now with this final one on the gender perspective. I myself as a woman can relate to everything that you’re saying, and I’m sorry that you had to go through what you went through in the meeting yesterday, but I’m sure that you’re offering all of these people a very new perspective and you are making your work environment more efficient and I can see from everything that you’ve been doing that you’re creating massive change for our country. Also, as a Brazilian, thank you so much for being in the position that you are right now; and looking forward to see what amazing things you’re going to accomplish in your role in the government, and wish you all the best. Thank you so much.

Marcia B: Thank you, Beatriz; it was really a pleasure to talk with you.

Shahzad G: With that, I would like to thank our guest, Prof. Marcia Barbosa, and our interviewer, Beatriz Araújo, for joining us on this episode of Atmospheric Tales. Thanks to all our listeners for tuning in — make sure to subscribe, and share!