The Amazon needs a new economic development model

A combination of advanced technology with biological assets could result in high value-added innovative products, experts say.

By Elton Alisson  |  Agência FAPESP – The Amazon needs a new economic development model grounded in advanced digital and biological technologies combined with the biome’s biological assets.

This change was advocated by participants in the International Bioeconomy Symposium held on December 9-10, 2016, in São Paulo, Brazil.

Organized by the São Paulo State Federation of Industry’s High Council for Innovation & Competitiveness (CONIC-FIESP) with FAPESP’s support, the event discussed successful international experiences in bioeconomy and urged the establishment of partnerships with other countries to energize Brazil’s bioeconomy.

The bioeconomy comprises all parts of the economy that sustainably utilize renewable biological resources to produce food, materials and energy.

The symposium was one of the preparatory events for the 2017 Bioeconomy Summit to be held in São Paulo next year to consolidate bioeconomy strategies for the formulation of public policies to stimulate these activities in Brazil.

“Instead of looking only at natural resources and the ecosystem services offered by the Amazon, we need to focus on the biome’s biological assets, which represent a great opportunity to develop the advanced technologies that make up what is known as the fourth industrial revolution,” said Juan Carlos Castilla-Rubio, Chairman of Space Time Ventures, a Brazilian technology company that specializes in incubating and scaling system-level change in resource-intensive industries.

Castilla-Rubio is a Peruvian entrepreneur and one of the authors of an article published in August in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America (PNAS). The lead author is Carlos Afonso Nobre, a researcher at the National Space Research Institute (INPE) and a member of the steering committee for FAPESP Research Program on Global Climate Change (RPGCC).

In the article, the researchers propose a plan to change the sustainable development paradigm for the Amazon by leveraging the biome’s potential to act as a large-scale technological innovation hub.

The proposed new paradigm consists of using advanced digital and biological technologies. The intersection of these technologies is driving a “fourth industrial revolution” (artificial intelligence, robotics, the Internet of Things, genomics, DNA editing, nanotechnology and 3D printing). Another goal is to associate these technologies with the region’s traditional knowledge to create high value-added innovative products and services.

“According to our vision, by combining the advanced digital technologies of the fourth industrial revolution with the region’s biological and biomimetic assets, we could create an economy of perhaps several trillion dollars in the Amazon, instead of today’s natural resource-focused economy worth tens of millions of dollars,” Castilla-Rubio said.

Biomimetics refers to the transfer of ideas and analogs from biology to technology.

Morpho butterfly

As an example of the Amazon’s biological assets (plants and animals) that have inspired technologists and industrial designers to develop new products using 3D printing, quantum computing and other digital technologies, Castilla-Rubio cited the morpho butterfly.

The genus Morpho contains some of the world’s most beautiful butterflies, with wings of an iridescent metallic blue color produced not by pigmentation but by the interaction of light with nanometric structures that have different refraction indices, enhancing the reflection of certain wavelengths. 

The English word iridescent derives from the Greek iris, meaning rainbow, and refers to the property of some surfaces to change color depending on the angle of view or illumination. 

“The nanometric structures and movements of the morpho butterfly’s wings are being studied by many researchers engaged in developing fabrics, coatings and very high-performance solar panels,” Castilla-Rubio said.

Another example, he added, is the foam produced by the tungara frog (Physalaemus pustulosus) to protect its eggs during incubation in small ponds in Amazonia. The foam contains enzymes that protect the eggs and tadpoles from pathogens in the water and from the adverse effects of the sun’s rays. The foam’s structure has served as an inspiration for the development of photosynthetic materials that convert solar energy into biofuel or capture carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.

“We believe that by combining advanced digital technologies with the Amazon’s biological resources, we will not only create novel products, solutions and technological platforms for existing markets but also bring entirely new markets into being,” Castilla-Rubio said.

“We have also discussed this new economic development model for Amazonia in the last six months in FIESP-CONIC and the World Economic Forum, of which I am a member of the Global Advisory Council, and we have received broad support.”

Protection of biodiversity

However, the authors of the study note that the biological assets found in the Amazon can contribute to a new industrial revolution only if action is taken to protect the rainforest’s biodiversity.

According to the data presented by Nobre, the development model implemented in the Amazon in the last 50 years is based on deforestation for ranching and crop cultivation, which has resulted in major environmental changes in the region.

“The agricultural frontier has advanced very rapidly, replacing primary forest with primitive agriculture that is both unsustainable and characterized by low productivity. It makes intensive use of slash-and-burn to transform the biome for farming and also as a fast way to extract timber, which is mostly illegal,” Nobre said.

Temperatures in the Amazon have risen 1.1ºC in recent decades, he stressed. If the rise in temperatures reaches 4ºC or deforestation exceeds 40%, the biome could break down, and the resulting savannization could become irreversible.

“We have observed that the dry season, which lasts at most three to four months, is getting longer in parts of the Amazon. If this becomes a trend, the Amazon could become one vast savannah,” Nobre said.

The article “Land-use and climate change risks in the Amazon and the need for a novel sustainable development paradigm” (doi: 10.1073/pnas.1605516113) by Nobre et al. can be read in the journal PNAS at pnas.org/content/113/39/10759.abstract.