Dredging and rock-blasting ever-drier rivers for new channels in Brazil might not achieve agribusiness’s goal of cheaper, year-round transport, experts warned, suggesting existing railways as price-comparable and more climate-resilient. Though waterway transport is promoted as lowering emissions, in fact proposed new shipping channels on the Tocantins and Madeira rivers increase carbon emissions and deforestation, experts told Mongabay. New shipping channel plans used old water data, stopping in 2017 for the Tocantins channel, and didn’t do climate risk projections or climate impact studies. Experts urge these studies must be done, or risk tens of billions of investments in rock-blasting and dredging river beds, leaving “ruins” and “abandoned projects.” An August lawsuit by federal prosecutors charges that licensing of rock-blasting and dredging in a 500-km stretch of the Tocantins River in Brazil is an illegal “trick” to circumvent legally required full environmental review of the whole Araguaia-Tocantins channel, for which an economic-technical feasibility study was never done. In March 2022, Ibama’s licensing director determined it was “unviable.” Brazil is poised to invest tens of billions reais to build more than 2,000 km (1,240 miles) of new shipping channels in shrinking rivers – a dramatic, costly, damaging channelization of Amazon waterways , which experts say will result in conversion of traditional peoples’ lands to carbon-intensive agriculture. In October 2022, the outgoing Bolsonaro presidency issued a preliminary license attesting to the supposed socio-environmental viability of a first 500-km piece of a long-dreamed-of Araguaia-Tocantins channel in the eastern Amazon, potentially 2,000-3,000 km (1,240-1,860 miles) long. In August, federal prosecutors sued to declare void the flawed Bolsonaro-era license and stop Ibama, the licensing branch, from issuing the installation license. They charged multiple illegalities in the preliminary license , “The license never proved socio-environmental viability,” federal prosecutor Sadi Flores Machado told Mongabay. Issued with 27 “pending” […]