Eder J. A. L. Pereira

Political polarization and the growing influence of radical-right movements are reshaping environmental governance in Latin America and the Caribbean (LACA) as biodiversity loss accelerates and climatic pressures intensify. Although extractive development strategies persist across governments with different political orientations, political movements that challenge environmental regulation, scientific authority, and public participation may create additional risks for institutional continuity. This Perspective examines how political transitions can weaken environmental protection through legislative reforms, administrative changes, and the erosion of enforcement capacity, drawing on recent developments across LACA. We discuss how these institutional processes interact with extractive expansion and climate extremes, potentially intensifying ecological degradation and disproportionately affecting Indigenous Peoples, traditional communities, and other environmentally vulnerable populations. Importantly, the ecological consequences of weakened protection may persist long after the administrations that initiated institutional changes. Habitat fragmentation, extinction debt, and slow biodiversity recovery can persist even after environmental safeguards are restored. These dynamics also threaten progress toward the Sustainable Development Goals as the 2030 deadline approaches. We identify policy priorities for maintaining effective environmental governance across electoral cycles, emphasizing institutional continuity, long-term ecological monitoring, public accountability, and the protection of environmental rights.

President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva's 2022 election renewed expectations of Brazilian environmental leadership, particularly in Amazon conservation. This study examines whether durable domestic institutional capacity supports this renewed international leadership. Drawing on official reports, satellite data, federal budget execution records (2005-2026), and the 2022 campaign platform, we combine environmental and political-institutional analyses to examine four dimensions of the 2022-2026 period: (i) fire activity as a high-frequency indicator of forest pressure; (ii) infrastructure development and hydrocarbon licensing, including the BR-319 highway and oil exploration along the Equatorial Margin; (iii) demand for critical minerals associated with artificial intelligence and its intersection with illegal mining in Indigenous territories; and (iv) the fiscal architecture of environmental enforcement. Deforestation declined substantially after 2022, but fire hotspots reached their highest level since 2007 in 2024, amid severe droughts. The Ministry of the Environment's headline budget rose from R$3.5 billion in 2022 to R$47.9 billion in 2026, driven almost entirely by the National Fund on Climate Change. Enforcement funding, however, remained volatile and dependent on midyear emergency credits, continuing a pattern observed under previous administrations. The 2026 general election, in which the opposition candidate led the first round while advocating faster environmental licensing and fiscal consolidation, further exposes the vulnerability of environmental policy to electoral change. Brazil's international environmental leadership thus remains constrained by an enforcement apparatus reliant on unstable funding and emergency allocations across successive administrations. Amazon protection requires sustained state commitment and stable, legally protected enforcement funding that does not depend on the government in office.

The urgent need to mitigate climate change has elevated green hydrogen as a sustainable alternative to fossil fuels, while green cryptocurrencies have emerged to address the environmental concerns of traditional cryptocurrency mining. This study investigates the dynamic correlation between the green hydrogen market and selected green cryptocurrencies (Cardano, Stellar, Hedera, Algorand, and Chia) from July 2021 to April 2024, utilizing the Dynamic Conditional Correlation GARCH (DCC-GARCH) model with robustness checks using EGARCH and GJR-GARCH specifications. Our findings reveal significant correlations, with peaks reaching up to 50% in 2022, a period likely influenced by the Russia-Ukraine conflict. Subsequently, a decline in these correlations was observed in 2023. These results underscore the interconnectedness of sustainability-driven markets, suggesting potential contagion effects during periods of global instability. The high persistence of correlation shocks (α + β values approaching unity) indicates that correlation regimes tend to be long- lasting, with important implications for portfolio diversification and risk management strategies. Robustness checks using EGARCH and GJR-GARCH specifications confirmed qualitatively similar patterns, reinforcing the validity of our findings into the evolving landscape of green finance and energy.

This paper evaluated the cross-correlation between the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa) markets with commodities and green bonds. For this purpose, the detrended moving-average cross-correlation coefficient ([ ] was used, based on a sliding windows approach, with data covering a sample before the COVID-19 pandemic, during the COVID-19 pandemic and after Russia invaded Ukraine. The results show a positive cross-correlation between BRICS markets and commodities and green bonds after the COVID-19 pandemic, mainly for long time scales. This result can contribute to financial risk analysis, especially regarding hedge funds.

In this paper we analyze the descriptive statistics of the Google search volume for the terms related to the National Reserve of Copper and Associates (RENCA), a Brazilian mineral reserve in the Amazon of 4.6 million hectares, before and after the government signed the decree releasing it for exploration. First, we analyze the volume of searches for expressions related to RENCA in Google Trends using descriptive statistics; second, we assess the cross-correlation coefficient ρ_DCCA, which measures the cross-correlation between two nonstationary time series across different time scales. After the government announced the release of the RENCA reserve, there was an increase in the average volume of Google searches for related terms, showing people’s concern about the announcement. By using the cross-correlation coefficient ρ_DCCA, we identify strong cross-correlations between the different expressions related to RENCA in Google Trends. Our work shows the utility of Google Trends as an indicator of the perception of environmental policies. Additionally, we show that ρ_DCCA can be used as a tool to measure the cross-correlation between synonyms extracted from Google Trends for various time scales.

Non-fungible tokens (NFTs) are a type of digital record of ownership used in a unique way: ensuring authenticity and uniqueness. Due to these characteristics, NFTs have been used in several markets: games, arts, and sports, among others. In 2020, the volume of negotiations of the NFTs was about USD 200 million. Despite the strong interest of economic agents in operating with NFTs, there are still gaps in the literature, regarding their dynamics and price interrelation with other potentially related assets, which deserve to be studied. In this sense, the main purpose in this paper is to analyze the cross-correlation between NFTs and larger cryptocurrencies. To this end, our methodological approach is based on a Detrended Cross-Correlation Analysis correlation coefficient, with a sliding windows approach. Our main finding is that the cross-correlations are not significant, except for a few cryptocurrencies, with weak significance at some moments of time. We also carried out an analysis of the long-term memory of NFTs, which demonstrated the antipersistence of these assets, with results seemingly corroborating the market inefficiency hypothesis. Our results are particularly important for different classes of investors, due to the analysis on different time scales.

This paper aims to deepen the discussion about the productive interdependence and regional resilience among the Brazilian states and regions through an input-output network analysis to identify emergent patterns or properties within the Brazilian states. We use an inter-regional IO matrix, the base year 2011, for the 27 Brazilian states and 68 sectors. The main results show that some states remain isolated in the Brazilian productive structure. Moreover, even with the spatial heterogeneity presented in the Brazilian economy, their inter-regional interdependence is situated at a level that enables the recovery even without some important links.