As wind, solar farms expand in Brazil, space for traditional ...

Labeled as a solution for global warming, renewable energy sources are receiving hefty incentives from both the public and private sectors. In Brazil alone, the installed wind energy capacity expanded nearly tenfold in the decade between 2011 and 2021, from 1.2% to 11.4% of the country’s energy mix. Solar power grew even more rapidly, by 26 times — from 0.1% to 2.6% of the mix. And if the federal government’s plans are carried out, this expansion will only accelerate over the decades to come.

But the low impact on the climate contrasts with the gigantic impacts that wind and solar farms are having on the ground level. For about seven years now, a group of Austrian researchers has been studying the effects these projects are having on traditional communities, especially in Brazil’s semiarid Caatinga biome. Here, many people are being denied access to regions they have occupied for many generations.

“In most cases, these are traditional communities that occupy public land,” says Thomas Bauer, a representative in Bahia state for the Pastoral Land Commission (CPT), an advocacy group affiliated with the Catholic Church. Known as fundo de pasto communities, these groups traditionally share a single piece of land on which they raise livestock and collect fruits and roots. “Having the paperwork for their land has never been an issue for these people. But because they are recognized as traditional communities, they have the legal right to the use of the land to graze their livestock, to gather firewood, and to collect medicinal plants and roots,” Bauer says.

The impact of wind and solar power farms on access to traditionally occupied land was the topic of a study published in the journal Nature Sustainability in May. By cross-referencing land data with information from ANEEL, the agency that runs Brazil’s national electricity grid, the group of U.K. and Austrian researchers concluded that 574 wind farms in Brazil occupy a total of 2,148 square kilometers (829 square miles), especially in the northeast region, covering a combined twice the size of the city of Rio de Janeiro. Solar farms occupy much less land: just 102 km2 (39 mi2) across 117 sites.

The researchers also found that 64% of the wind farms are located on private land; in the case of solar farms, that proportion is 96%. In most cases, the land titles were obtained a few years before or after the first investments were made in the respective projects. The study flags this pattern as an indication that “most of the privatizations are directly linked to development of a project.”

One example is the Primavera wind farm, which occupies 1,827 hectares (4,515 acres) in the municipality of Morro do Chapéu, in Bahia. According to the study, the first investment was made in 2012. About three years later, the plots of land that make up the site began to be privatized.

“The imperative of climate change has strong impact because it legitimizes certain types of access to and control over public lands,” says study co-author Michael Klingler, a researcher at BOKU University’s Institute of Sustainable Economic Development in Austria.

The authors observed a modus operandi in the means by which these companies appropriate public lands. Bauer, who produced a documentary on the impact of wind farms, says one of the tactics is to recruit local community leaders who present false documentation to gain possession of the land. These people in turn transfer ownership of the land to the companies at a later date. In other cases, companies serve as a front, offering a “cleaning” service, which means guaranteeing the removal of the community and elimination of their legal right to land title from public agencies. “Then, the [wind or solar power] company that comes onto the scene will say, ‘I had nothing to do with what happened before I got here; I purchased the land legally,’” Bauer says.

Companies also send representatives into the communities to try and co-opt local leaders, promising jobs and artesian wells. Thirty-year leases are another part of the strategy.

“In the community of Sumidouro, where one of the first wind parks in Bahia was built, the project split the community into three groups because the company caused a great deal of fighting when it arrived,” says study co-author Johannes Schmidt, also from the Institute of Sustainable Economic Development. “Oftentimes, the companies try to make contracts with individuals rather than with the community as a whole, which has historically shared land. This creates conflicts.”

The green stamp and government support

Despite the fact that most of the solar and wind energy projects belong to Brazilian companies, the role of foreign capital caught the researchers’ attention. International players, especially from Europe, are involved in 78% of all the wind projects and 96% of the solar projects, either as owners or investors. Brazil’s National Bank for Economic and Social Development (BNDES) is also a player in the sector, investing in 15% of the land occupied by wind farms in Brazil.

The government offers a range of tax incentives and facilities to companies in the sector, justifying them on the basis of the climate agenda. Last year, for example, President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva declared “zero tax” on solar panels and announced investments of 50 billion reais ($10 billion) for what he called “Brazil’s largest energy transition program.”

“These are new policies to promote the growth of renewable energy sources, which are important,” Klingler says. “Nobody is against expansion of wind and solar power, but the ways in which these projects are being implemented are very problematic.”

Incentives granted by the government also increase the power gap between companies and communities. In 2020, for example, the Bahia state government issued a regulation facilitating the privatization of public lands for wind farms. This came in the face of years of struggle by traditional peoples trying to gain recognition of their land from the government. “Corporations have much greater access to the state, on all levels, than do the communities,” Schmidt says.

For Fábio Pitta, a researcher at Harvard University and the University of São Paulo, it seems like déjà vu. He recalls how it was also Lula who, in his first term in office in the early 2000s, rolled out a stimulus for ethanol production. That, together with the high price of sugar on the international market, led to the aggressive spread of sugarcane farming in Brazil, which also directly impacted small farmers and agricultural workers.

“There was all this propaganda about it being renewable energy back then as well. In 2003, they invented flex-fuel cars [that could run on ethanol and gasoline] and the BNDES invested a ton of money in sugar mills. Many oil companies set up in Brazil and invested in ethanol production — not unlike what is happening with wind farms today — and the impact was brutal,” says Pitta, who heads the Justice and Human Rights Social Network connecting land rights defense organizations.

The impacts of the renewable energy megaprojects extend far beyond restrictions on access to land for local communities, as described in a document compiled by the Austrian researchers working with nonprofit organizations. Vast regions are deforested to make space for the panels in solar power projects. And the constant noise produced by the turbines on wind farms scares off native animals and disturbs the sleep and quality of life of the people living nearby, resulting in rising rates of depression.

The group has also created a map showing all the projects already installed, under construction or in the planning stages in the state of Bahia. The mapping project will soon encompass all of Brazil, with the objective of informing traditional communities of the threats to their territories and creating an opportunity for them to join forces in defending their ways of life.

“Just because an energy source seems renewable doesn’t mean it has no impacts,” Pitta says. “It’s one thing to say that it’s clean power in terms of the way it’s generated as compared to fossil fuels. But it’s another thing to say that because of this it has no social consequences.”

 Banner image: Communities who have been sharing the same piece of land for years have suddenly found themselves denied access to take their livestock to pasture or collect fruits and roots. Image courtesy of Thomas Bauer/CPT/H3000.

This story was reported by Mongabay’s Brazil team and first published here on our Brazil site on June 13, 2024.

Citation:

Klingler, M., Ameli, N., Rickman, J., & Schmidt, J. (2024). Large-scale green grabbing for wind and solar photovoltaic development in Brazil. Nature Sustainability, 7(6), 747-757. doi:10.1038/s41893-024-01346-2

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