Fed up with Brazil’s politicians not listening, a climate scientist runs for office

From ScienceMag:

One Saturday morning in late August, 100 or so women in white T-shirts demonstrate for women’s rights in a park in São José dos Campos, Brazil. They march under tall trees, a tiny remnant of the Atlantic Forest, the decimated biome that once carpeted a wide band along Brazil’s ocean coastline. It’s winter in Brazil, but Luciana Gatti is sweating. She says El Niño is causing the unseasonably sultry weather.

Gatti, a climate scientist at the National Institute for Space Research (INPE), is here to ask the protesters for their votes. She’s on the ballot in Brazil’s 4 October elections, campaigning for a São Paulo seat in the Chamber of Deputies, the lower house of the country’s National Congress. Her platform is informed by her own research that shows even relatively modest logging threatens the entire Amazon rainforest, an important carbon sink that could turn into a huge carbon source, speeding up climate change. Legislators are not acting on the evidence—so she will take the fight directly to them, she says. “I will scream there.”

“I was very happy when she decided to become a candidate,” says fellow INPE employee Carlos Nobre, one of Brazil’s most prominent climate scientists. “Let’s hope she will be elected.” He says Gatti could help the legislature—which does not currently have a single scientist among its 513 representatives—make better informed decisions.

Gatti fell in love with nature as a child, sometimes sitting entranced for hours in the canopy of a tree. At college in the early 1980s she threw herself into revolutionary politics, opposing the military dictatorship that ruled Brazil. She studied chemistry, then earned a Ph.D. in environmental science. Since 2003 she has run the Greenhouse Gas Laboratory at INPE.

There, Gatti has spent her career collecting and studying samples of the atmosphere captured above the Amazon. Her findings have been alarming. In a 2021 Nature paper she showed that carbon uptake across the Amazon is slowing—and that the southeastern forest, which is particularly degraded, has turned from a carbon sink to a source.

Studies of tree growth had suggested the Amazon’s carbon uptake was declining, but these sampled trees across relatively small areas. Atmospheric measurements, on the other hand, reflect changes across vast swaths of the Amazon, says Paulo Brando, an ecology professor at Yale University. “The atmosphere cannot lie.”

By measuring carbon monoxide—a proxy for fire—Gatti also concluded that by warming and drying the jungle, deforestation is leading to more fires, which wipe out even more vegetation in a destructive feedback loop. The paper was a “huge landmark,” Brando says.

Despite the worrisome degradation of the Amazon, Gatti says the Brazilian government has failed to act decisively, even under the presidency of the left-wing Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, generally a champion of forest protection. The major pillars of the Brazilian economy—including soy, beef, and timber production—foster deforestation, she says, and a supermajority of the National Congress consistently caters to their interests.

A stark demonstration of that center-right bloc’s power catalyzed her run for office. In November 2025, the congress passed a legislative package that all but guts the country’s rural land protection laws. The new law often leaves enforcement of mining and forestry rules, such as the requirement that 80% of a plot of Amazonian land must be left uncut, to landowners themselves. What environmentalists have dubbed “the devastation bill” was “my last straw,” Gatti says. “They are destroying the environmental protections one after other.” When, earlier this year, a political operative asked her to run as a member of the left-wing Socialism and Liberty Party (PSOL), she was ready.

Gatti says if she gets into power, she will lobby to move Brazil’s economy away from the agricultural and extractive activities that promote forest clearing. She plans to call for a slate of climate adaptation steps, many intended to protect vulnerable favela dwellers, such as painting roofs white and planting trees. She also envisions creating a powerful new institution staffed with nonpolitical specialists that could overrule the government on policies that might have an adverse impact on the climate.

In São José dos Campos, after the swampy heat stops the march short, Gatti gives an impromptu speech under the shade of a gazebo. In unadorned language she describes the importance of the Amazon forest for curtailing global warming, painting a visceral and emotional picture of the hotter future that she’s anxious to prevent. She talks of the plight of millions of Brazilians living in uninsulated masonry and tin houses, unable to afford air conditioning. Because the same people are less likely to have trees nearby to provide shade and cooling and often perform outdoor manual labor, they face mortal risks from surging temperatures, she says.

Few prominent climate scientists have been elected to higher political office around the world. Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum Pardo, an environmental engineer, ran in part on a slate of climate proposals. But, unlike her and Gatti, Canadian climate modeler Andrew Weaver, a member of Canada’s Green Party, never campaigned on climate issues. He says his supporters could easily guess his views and preferred to hear his positions on other things. He was elected to the Legislative Assembly of British Columbia in 2013 and then again in ’17, where he fought for, and in some cases won, climate friendly policies.

At least at the women’s march, Gatti’s climate message seems to strike a chord. The crowd listens attentively. A group energized by her emotional outpouring gathers around her when she’s done. They chant her rallying cries and complain that the legislature has too few women—and needs scientists.

Marco Gabriel Marcondes de Moura, a political scientist who recently completed a study of the electoral potential of São Paulo’s candidates for the Chamber of Deputies, says Brazil’s proportional voting system makes it hard to judge Gatti’s prospects. PSOL stalwarts running in the same district could siphon votes from her. He adds that Gatti’s gender and scientific profession might “well limit the target audience she needs to get elected.”

If she is successful, Gatti would likely face a legislature overwhelmingly opposed to the urgent forest-protection measures she demands. How much she could achieve would depend on the balance of interests in the next congress and her own political skills, Marcondes de Moura says.

Whatever her future in politics, Gatti says she plans to go on studying the air above the Amazon for clues to its future—and the world’s. Even if she has to pause her work for a while, she says, “there’s no way I’m going to stop being a scientist.”

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