Brazil judge blocks paving of highway through heart of Amazon rainforest

By Jake Spring

SAO PAULO (Reuters) - A Brazilian judge on Thursday issued an injunction to stop the paving of a highway through the center of the Amazon rainforest, amid fears the roadway would boost deforestation and further drive climate change.

Right-wing former President Jair Bolsonaro had pledged to pave the BR-319 roadway, a project that has massive local support in the Amazon despite experts and environmentalists' concerns around deforestation.

In his final months in office in 2022, Bolsonaro's government issued a permit allowing it to go forward.

A judge suspended the license in a decision that cited the need to have measures in place to control deforestation before paving, according to court documents on Thursday.

"Justice was done. The importance of this decision is gigantic," said Suely Araujo, a policy expert with environmental lobby group Climate Observatory, which brought the lawsuit seeking to block the road.

"There are no conditions to control the explosion of deforestation that paving the road will cause."

Paving the road would allow illegal loggers and land grabbers to more easily access remote and relatively untouched areas of the world's largest rainforest, environmental experts said. Deforestation is the largest source of Brazil's greenhouse gas emissions that help to drive climate change.

One study estimated the project would result in a fivefold rise in deforestation by 2030, the equivalent of an area larger than the U.S. state of Florida.

Brazil's then-military government built the 900-km (560-mile) BR-319 highway in the 1970s as the sole road connection between the Amazon's largest city of Manaus and the rest of the country.

But it quickly fell into disrepair and now spends much of the year as an impassable stretch of muddy dirt road during the Amazon's annual rainy season.

Left-wing Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, who took office in 2023, has spoken favorably of paving BR-319, saying that it can be done while also protecting the environment.

His government formed a working group to study the road project but had not moved ahead with paving.

(Reporting by Jake Spring; Editing by Sandra Maler)