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You're listening to TED Talks Daily, where we bring you new ideas to spark your curiosity every day. I'm your host, Elise Hu. Forests are nature's superpower and will always be better than cleared land, according to civic entrepreneur Ileana Saboa de Carvalho.
In her talk, she shares why nature-aligned economies outperform destructive practices and says it's time for innovative financial programs to help drive an economic paradigm shift that supports us and our planet.
a nature superpower. Sounds great, right? But what does it mean? In Brazil, achieving superpower status goes far beyond renewables and green tech. It starts with fundamentally redesigning our relationship with nature. Over half of global GDP depends on everything nature provides for free. the air we breathe, the water we drink, the stability of our climate.
That's why I bring nature to the forefront of policy, from international diplomacy to economic planning. It's easy to understand our reasons. Brazil holds the biggest tropical forest on Earth. We have one of the widest and longest rivers on the planet. We're more biologically diverse than any other nation, with more kinds of plants and animals and microbes and fungi. Well, you get the point.
I'm an entrepreneur, and I've seen the path for how Brazil and other countries can truly become nature's superpowers. But before we go there, we need to overcome big challenges. And the biggest of them all is deforestation. Over the past 40 years, an area larger than California has been cleared to make way for progress in Brazil.
And what makes this problem more challenging is that over 90 percent of deforestation in Brazil is illegal. Trees cut down today are connected to illicit economies like land grabbing, wildlife trafficking, illegal gold mining and dodgy agriculture and ranching practices. These environmental crimes are a big business, generating around 280 billion dollars a year in illicit profits globally.
And all of this illegal deforestation has planetary consequences, taking our carbon forests too close to the point of no return. So we need to change this up, because this is stabilizing our food production and our water and climate security. I've spent the last two decades preventing and reducing crime, including those below the forest canopy.
My team supports police, prosecutors, financial crimes experts to track illegal products and follow the money across the Amazon basin. But here's the truth. We can't police our way out of this problem. We're just too big. The Amazon alone is larger than the European Union. So yes, of course, we need better policing and prosecution.
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