The final speaker in this session at the AoIR 2025 conference is Thales Rodrigues Antonelli, whose interest is in how climate issues are instrumentalised in parliamentarian debates, taking a very long-term perspective stretching over some 78 years. This requires a taxonomy of such claims, which also enables a connection of domestic debates in Brazil with broader debates around the world.
The key focus here is on the connection between land use and climate change. Land use changes – which for instance cause deforestation – are a key issue in Brazil; this also continues concerns that date back to the impacts of violent European colonisation, and is reflected in a long debate around property ownership and civil rights which strengthened especially in the twentieth century.
In Brazil, land and territory rights were finally enshrined in the 1988 federal constitution, providing mechanisms for the preservation and redistribution of land. This has been a broad success, enabling the settlement of landless families, the conservation of vulnerable environments, and the protection of Indigenous and related territories; this is also unevenly distributed across the various Brazilian states, however, and the allocation of such lands to traditional and other owners is not necessarily strongly protected from agricultural and extractive industry interests – clashes between them and the rightful owners of land, and encroachment onto such lands, are common.
Such issues are frequently debated in Brazilian federal parliament, with various political actors taking diverging stances on these policies. Attempts to delegitimise such policies also seek to undermine their social and societal acceptance, and ultimately dehumanise the Indigenous and other traditional communities whom these policies are mean to to protect. Parliament is usually the first place where the legal, social, and moral dimensions of these struggles are being discussed.
The project therefore scraped data from the speech archives of the Chamber of Deputies (the lower house), extracting some 47,000 transcriptions of speeches that contained keywords relevant to the debate from February 1946 to December 2024, as well as associated metadata such as speaker and party affiliation. These vary considerably in length, from one to twenty minutes. They were analysed through LLM-assisted content analysis, using a contextual dictionary and human-coded examples; this also needed to take into account language changes in public debate over this very long timespan.
Key themes represent claims that climate change is a lie, that the economy must come first, and that we cannot trust land rights movements; these break down further into more specific sub-claims in each case. Further work will trace the evolution of such claims over the longer timeframe covered by this study, and link this to external factors such as major land-rights movements, and the oppressive military dictatorship between 1964 and 1984.
