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GAIN ACCESS TO EXCLUSIVE MEMBER-ONLY EXPERIENCES, PRODUCT LAUNCHES, AND MORE THROUGHOUT…Mongabay has begun publishing a new edition of the book, “A Perfect Storm in the Amazon,” in short installments and in three languages: Spanish, English and Portuguese.
The macroeconomic hypothesis that infrastructure investments stimulate economic growth assumes that these physical assets overcome a logistical or systemic constraint on production. In practice, this requires for individual projects to be the subject to an objective feasibility analysis, are priced fairly, and have been approved after the full evaluation of their social and environmental impacts.
The most obvious infrastructure investment that meet these criteria are the physical assets that are the foundation of the region’s health care systems. The COVID pandemic of 2020/2021 revealed glaring deficiencies in the health care system in all eight nations. The impact of the disease was particularly severe in their Amazonian jurisdictions where it fell disproportionately on marginalized populations.
Amazonian cities have invested in drinking water systems, typically with the assistance of the multilateral banks, but are still dumping nearly all their wastewater into the Amazon and its tributaries, operating under the assumption that the volume of water will provide a level of protection against contamination. Unfortunately, that practice does not protect the downstream populations from diseases caused by poor sanitation.
Fortunately, investments in schools, clinics and sanitation systems are labor intensive and require significant amounts of concrete, lumber, and hardware, which ensures they meet the short-term objectives of infrastructure investment program – job creation and economic stimulus.
Interligação Elétrica do Madeira is a subsidiary of the private Brazilian transmission company ISA CTEEP. It builds, implements, operates and maintains electric power transmission facilities under concession contract. Credit: PAC Collection on flickr.com, an ambitious initiative to lay 8,000 kilometers of fiber optic cable on the bottom of the Amazon river and all its major tributaries.
Roads and bridges can also be sustainable. They are anathema to environmental advocates because of their association with logging, deforestation, and settlement. However, these classic examples of built infrastructure contribute to sustainable economic growth when they improve secondary road networks within long-established agricultural frontiers.
Another underappreciated infrastructure class are the airports that support the aviation transportation system. Regional carriers have benefitted from investments in airports in larger cities, but the development of smaller airstrips is largely managed ad hoc by the military, loggers and miners.
The relationship between GDP and energy consumption may change in the next fifty years at the global scale as societies transition from fossil fuels to a low-carbon economy. It is not, however, the path that will characterize development in the Pan Amazon. Energy consumption will grow in the Amazon because access to affordable and reliable sources of electrical energy improve the quality of the lives of most of its inhabitants.
The pandemic of 2021 highlighted the social and economic inequalities of Amazonian society, but no well-informed observer was surprised by the suffering that COVID-19 wreaked on remote IFndigenous villages, smallholder landscapes and the marginalized neighborhoods in rapidly growing urban centers. The asymmetric impact was not unlike the scenario that played out in the advanced economies where other disadvantaged populations suffered disproportionately from a legacy of under investment.
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