Confluence: International Rivers, Brazil
Channel: Weave News
Date: 2022-03-28

Confluence's mission is to empower the voices of river guardians and highlight stories of communities and waterways around the world. To learn more visit: weave news.org/confluence. 

Name: Flavio Montiel
Location: Brazil
Organization: International Rivers
Website/Social Media: http://internationalrivers.org/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/intlrivers/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/intlrivers
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/InternationalRivers/

Transcript:

My name is Flavio Montiel. I am a sociologist, I work on protection of rivers and nature for a long time and today I'm working as the director of the Amazon program and International rivers. I am working with communities, working with protection of rivers, especially in the Amazon region. 

The water is the sap of our planet, and it is an essential condition for life on every planet or animal or human being because water is life, water keeps life independent from the human beings.  It's difficult to say what are the most important rivers that we are focusing on but here in Brazil we have three main bases that are settling the Amazon region. The Tapajós basin, the Xingu basin and the Madeira basin are the biggest basins in the Amazon region. 

At International rivers we work in a broad way, with an international approach, we work for the permanent protection of rivers. Also, we think it's important to make a moratorium for dams in the world. This moratorium means that we need to stop building dams in all the world. We are also working for new renewable energies that are most important besides dams that we need to do to increase our planets. They are less expensive, they are fuel and clean energy and they must be increased all over the world. We don't need more dams to generate energy. 

We have a proposal that we are working on here in Brazil that is to build a law for the permanent protection of rivers. We are discussing this initiative especially with social movements and civil society organizations to increase the law that we have currently about the management of water. We know that today in Brazil there is a lot of violence against the defenders of rivers, because there are huge economic interests behind illegal logging, mining and big dams. In several cases, there is a link between the construction of dams and corruption. When we talk to local river defenders, they are in a very harsh situation because it is all the big economic interests against them and they depend on water to survive. We need to understand that today these defenders are responsible for most parts of the forest that are still intact of the Amazon region. They are the guardians of what we still have of clean water, forests and rivers. It is important to work with them, we are only supporting characters in this endeavor, they are really the people who protect the rivers.