Islanders and experts have warned of widespread environmental and social impacts from the construction of a bridge linking the Brazilian city of Salvador with the island of Itaparica in Todos os Santos Bay.
Critics say the project will devastate mangrove forests and coral reefs, leading to environmental imbalance, compromising fishing communities and threatening the survival of many marine species including humpback whales and sea turtles.
Proponents say the bridge will boost development in the region, in particular transporting agricultural produce, but islanders say the anticipated population surge on Itaparica will create unsustainable pressure on public services as well as drastically change the dynamics of the community living there.
Experts say the best solution for improving transportation links between Salvador and Itaparica is to invest in the existing ferry system, but this option wasn’t considered by planners.
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“It seems like they intentionally neglected the ferry system just to create enough discontent so that people would accept construction of this bridge,” says Maria José Pacheco, executive secretary of the Bahia Fishermen’s Protection Council.
Passengers making the crossing between the Brazilian city of Salvador and the island of Itaparica in Todos os Santos Bay on the Atlantic have a litany of complaints about the ferry service: delays, dirtiness, mechanical problems, even collisions. One of the previous operators was accused of overbilling and poor management; the current operator has already been hit with millions of reais in fines for similar problems.
The ferry crossing across the mouth of the bay takes about 50 minutes. A proposed bridge would cut that time down to just 15 minutes. Construction is expected to start in 2025, and once completed in four years’ time, the 12.4-kilometer (7.7-mile) span will be the second-longest bridge in the Southern Hemisphere, after Rio de Janeiro’s 13.29-km (8.26-mi) Niterói bridge.
A consortium of two Chinese companies won the bid for the Salvador-Itaparica bridge in 2020. The public-private partnership has a price tag of 9 billion reais ($1.5 billion). The companies’ portfolios include similar grand public works projects, including the world’s largest maritime bridge in the Sea of China, and railway lines in Ethiopia and Nigeria. The 35-year concession for the Salvador-Itaparica Island Highway Bridge System, as it’s known, involves the construction phase, operation and maintenance, as well as works including roads, tunnels, viaducts and toll plazas.
The bridge between Salvador and Itaparica is expected to shorten the crossing time from 50 minutes by ferry to 15 minutes by road.
An environmentally aggressive logistical shortcut
Heavy trucks are limited on the existing ferry service. That makes the bridge project attractive to some sectors because it offers an alternative route for transporting agricultural produce from the fertile Recôncavo region around Salvador without having to drive around the entire bay. But the environmental impact from increased truck traffic on the island, between the landing point at Vera Cruz and its northern tip at Itaparica, has raised concerns about this region where the natural landscape and rural lifestyles have largely been preserved.
“The bridge will be very invasive and bring no real benefits to the island,” says Tânia França, an Itaparica resident and representative of the Cultural and Environmental Religious Association (ARCA). “It will only be progress for the state of Bahia because it will be a way to get production to the city of Salvador.”
Itaparica Island lies in Todos os Santos Bay and is home to some 65,000 people. Image courtesy of Felipe Peixoto Ribeiro.
Todos os Santos, or All Saints, is Brazil’s largest bay, covering 1,233 square kilometers (476 square miles). Eighteen municipalities in the state of Bahia are dotted along its coastline, home to 4.5 million people, mostly in the Salvador Metropolitan Area at the eastern edge of the bay. Rich in both marine biodiversity and the wildlife of the coastal Atlantic Rainforest, the bay sustains many traditional fishing communities who stand to be directly impacted by the bridge project.
“The environmental impact study is supposed to be used to approve the license, which should not have been issued, because the study is incomplete,” Severino Agra, a biology professor at the Federal University of Bahia (UFBA) and co-founder of the Bahia Environmentalist Group (Gambá), tells Mongabay.
Also an expert in environmental legislation, Agra wrote a technical note listing the problems with the environmental impact statement presented by the project concession holder. To date, the project has only been granted a preliminary license, with the Bahia state government yet to approve the definitive license before construction can actually begin.
In Vera Cruz, on the southern part of Itaparica Island, a sensitive area of mangrove forest is slated to be cleared so that 8 km (5 mi) of the existing BA-001 highway can be widened and 22 km (13.7 mi) of new highway can be built. These are meant to improve the flow of vehicles between the bridge, the island and the Recôncavo region, even if this means destroying native vegetation.
Mangrove forests are essential for maintaining coastal ecosystems because they work as natural barriers against erosion, they capture carbon, and they filter out pollutants. The shallow water crowded with the dense vegetation and its interwoven roots serves as a nursery for a variety of marine species, offering a safe, nutrient-rich environment for fish, crustaceans and mollusks to grow.
Native vegetation on Itaparica Island. Image courtesy of Felipe Peixoto Ribeiro.
It’s in this transition zone between freshwater and the seawater that groups of women called marisqueiras gather food to sustain their families. Collecting shellfish like oysters and mussels, theirs is a sustainable, artisanal tradition that helps monitor and protect natural resources.
But the area used by the marisqueiras will be reduced because of the roadworks. “The number of shellfish they will be able to collect will be brutally reduced,” Agra says. “The concessionary’s own study admits that there will be a loss of vegetation in the mangroves.”
Impacts on marine life and artisan fishing
According to Agra, driving the pillars for the bridge will produce underwater noise and vibrations that could affect numerous species of aquatic life, resulting in changed behavior and even reduced numbers. These species include corals, which are vital for balancing the local ecosystem. Dolphins frequently visit the bay, while sea turtles lay their eggs on the beaches here.
A rendering of the Salvador-Itaparica bridge across the mouth of Todos os Santos Bay. Image courtesy of the Salvador-Itaparica Island Highway Bridge System.
The 139 pillars planned for the project could also pose a barrier to the passage of large mammals like humpback whales. These animals are regaining lost territory in Brazilian waters, migrating to the coastline here from June to November to reproduce and feed.
“Humpback whales were rarely seen in Todos os Santos Bay until five years ago, when they started to return again, despite all the problems with human activities like container ship traffic,” Enrico Marcovaldi, a researcher with local NGO Projeto Baleia Jubarte (Humpback Whale Project), tells Mongabay. The project has maintained an observation center at Praia do Forte, a beach in Salvador, for 25 years.
Its researchers have reported 1,008 sightings of humpback whales in the area during the 90-day observation season this year. Of these, 72 were inside Todos os Santos Bay. “This doesn’t mean that over 1,000 whales were seen, because many were seen a number of times,” Marcovaldi says.
A rendering of the Salvador-Itaparica bridge across the mouth of Todos os Santos Bay. Image courtesy of the Salvador-Itaparica Island Highway Bridge System.
The bridge project’s current phase — which started in January 2024 and is expected to end in 2025 — is to carry out geotechnical surveying, which analyzes the soil, both on solid ground as well as on the seabed, using barges to drill 102 boreholes and collect core samples.
“This procedure will stir up sediment from below the ground, which probably contains old contaminants like oil and heavy metal residual,” Agra says. “Every time they build a pillar, these contaminants will become suspended in the water again.”
The work also places the survival of numerous communities that depend on the bay at risk, like the 19th-century Afro-Brazilian fishing settlement at Alto do Tororó Quilombo in the Salvador suburb of São Tomé.
“Our concern has now turned to desperation because during the construction, all the coral and reefs that provide food for the fish we capture will disappear,” says community leader J. Salvador da Paz Barros. “There used to be many different fish, crustacean and mollusk species here, but due to the pollution in the bay, few remain. Construction of the bridge will be the final blow to artisanal fishing here.”
Overpopulation on Itaparica Island
One of the main objectives driving the bridge’s construction is to transform Itaparica Island into a housing option for Salvador, which, with an official population of 2.6 million is Brazil’s fifth most populous city.
With the new bridge in place, there’s expected to be a population surge on the island from the current 65,000 inhabitants to 220,000 by 2050.
Those already living on the island today say they’re skeptical about the benefits, citing concerns about the pressure on public services. “What does this increase in population imply in terms of violence, urban disorder and land ownership pressure that will be placed on traditional communities?” Pacheco says. “There will more people needing public health and schooling services, which are already precarious.”
Vera Cruz, home to the island’s ferry terminal and where the new bridge will make landfall, has an official population of some 45,000 people. They’re served by 49 schools (only five of which are high schools), 19 public health clinics, and a public sanitation system that reaches less than a quarter of the population. Itaparica, at the island’s north and covering just 18% of its territory, has 20,000 inhabitants, 26 schools (three high schools) and 10 public health clinics. Nearly half of the homes are connected to the sewer system.
A rural way of living and natural landscapes have been preserved on Itaparica Island. Photo by Felipe Peixoto Ribeiro.
“The island will end up being just another suburb of Salvador,” Agra says. “It won’t be a summer place anymore, a place to get away from the city. It will be chaotic because, in order to become organized urban areas, the towns will need to be managed efficiently. But if this actually happens, so much will already be out of control — public sanitation, health, policing, schools — that it will be nearly impossible to revert the disorder.”
Despite the concerns, the real estate market is already heating up. Residents have noted rising land and home prices, as well as more land grabbing in open areas. “If the island becomes more valuable as an urban area, it’s bad,” Agra says. “And if it’s also not valued as expected, it’s also bad. In both scenarios, the first thing that is going to happen is the village where the fishermen live will be taken from them because they don’t have title to the land. They’ll get sent outside town or even be forced off the island.”
Another concern is the loss of green areas, like Sitio dos Milagres, a 47-hectare (116-acre) patch of Atlantic Rainforest that’s been preserved for decades through the work of Venceslau Monteiro, an Itaparica resident who became a near-mythical figure in the community in the last century after his blindness was said to have been cured at a spring in the forest.
“Venceslau Monteiro was a great environmentalist in his time,” says Tânia França from ARCA, the organization that manages Sitio dos Milagres (“Site of Miracles”). “He took care of this green space, making sure no one cut down the trees. As the years passed, it became a place of pilgrimage and where rituals from the Afro-Brazilian cultures were carried out.”
Title to the land, once held by a real estate agency, was transferred to the city as payment for debts. According to França, the city promised to turn Sitio dos Milagres into an ecological park for religious use, similar to São Bartolomeu Park in Salvador.
Native vegetation is preserved in Itaparica’s Sitio dos Milagres for the celebration of religious rituals. Image courtesy of ARCA.
Plans for compensation and less invasive alternatives
Local and traditional communities say the bridge project was drawn up without the necessary dialogue.
“No one heard from the fishermen and marisqueiras, despite protests on the part of community groups against the environmental impacts, and not only here on Itaparica Island,” says community leader Barros. “We were simply ignored, as usual, forgotten. No compensation has ever been mentioned.”
The project’s environmental impact statement dedicates 40 pages to mitigation and compensation plans “in environmental and social and economic terms, in safekeeping of the interests of the local populations and the biophysical environment.” The descriptions of these actions are, however, vague and superficial.
“The mitigation measures proposed by the concessionary consist merely of titles, with no explanation whatsoever,” says Agra, the biology professor. “It’s only a proposal of intentions, with no clarification as to how they will be implemented.”
The Bahia state government has issued a notice saying the preliminary license included inquiries with the traditional communities on the island and that the company responsible had created a plan for land acquisition, relocation and compensation. When questioned by Mongabay, the concession holder for the Salvador-Itaparica Island Highway Bridge System said the basic project had been modified, adding that “measures have already been taken to avoid any interferences in mangrove forests.”
The municipality of Itaparica at the northern tip of the eponymous island. Image courtesy of Felipe Peixoto Ribeiro.
For many, the best solution would be to invest in the existing ferry system. “It would be better if there was a fixed schedule, with crossings every 30 minutes that run past midnight,” França says. Barros adds that, “Instead of building a bridge, they could buy more ferries that were larger, able to carry more weight and go faster. That would minimize the environmental impact.”
The public ferry system, in operation since 1972, was privatized in 1996. The concession passed through several companies before it was taken over by Internacional Travessias Salvador, the current operator. According to the company, more than 15,000 people and 2,000 vehicles take the ferry every day (including vehicle passengers and walk-ons). The company operates seven ferries that can carry, on average, 700 people and 60 vehicles per trip. But on most days, only three or four boats are in operation, leaving at least every hour, from 5 a.m. to 11:30 p.m.
When asked about problems with the ferry service, Internacional Travessias Salvador told Mongabay that long waiting lines only accumulate on three-day weekends and holidays, when the number of people crossing can triple. It also said it has invested in new cleaning and maintenance teams.
Improving the ferry service has been touted as a more economically viable alternative to building the bridge, but it wasn’t considered by planners. During the last bid for the purchase of ferries, the price of a new boat was 30 million reais ($4.9 million), a fraction of the bridge’s 9 billion reais price tag.
“Not building the bridge is one of the alternatives,” Agra says. “The law requires that the impact statement evaluate every alternative in detail so the impacts can be compared and the least aggressive option can be chosen. This includes the option of not going through with the project.”
Banner image: Researchers recorded 72 humpback whale sightings inside Todos os Santos Bay this year alone. Image courtesy of Enrico Marcovaldi/Projeto Baleia Jubarte.
This story was first published here in Portuguese on Nov. 25, 2024.
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