Naturally we in the Cidade Maravilhosa are delighted to have beaten out the Windy City and snatched the 2016 Olympics from under the nose of the not-quite-glamorous-enough First Couple of the United States: even Obama can’t compete with Copacabana when it comes to wowing Olympic committees.

But now that the cheering has died down along with the hangovers, a sober consideration of what the Olympics will mean for the world’s most interesting and biodiverse urban environment is in order.

You don’t normally associate biodiversity and conservation with cities, but Rio de Janeiro is an exception. Its extraordinary topography means that steep hill slopes and mountainsides are still forested: not the least of the issues associated with the growth of favelas, Rio’s hillside slums, is that their expansion corrodes this green mantle.

Rio’s forests are a remnant of the Atlantic Forest that once covered most of coastal Brazil and stretched as far inland as Paraguay. Only 7 per cent is left, making it much more threatened than the Amazon and even more biodiverse, since the su