The Amazon rainforest has seen more than 200,000 fires break out this year triggering a global climate emergency
From the Arctic to the Amazon, fires are raging at an unprecedented scale, stoking an unfathomable fear: is the planet staring at an irreversible meltdown?
THE FIRES RAGING in the world’s largest rainforest are just refusing to die down, and so are the controversies around it. Since January, more than 200,000 fires have been alight across the Amazon, famed for its biodiversity and dubbed the lungs of the planet. Hundreds of the blazes are now spreading to denser and pristine patches, hurting wildlife in their path and threatening some of the last forest refuges of indigenous tribes, many of whom remain uncontacted (see ‘We are protectors of Amazon’ on p40). Though the Amazon spans eight South American countries, blazes are most intense along its southern swath in Brazil that controls 60 per cent of the rainforest.
To put out the fires, the government has deployed 44,000 troops and military aircrafts in its six affected states. On August 29, it announced a 60-day ban on the use of fire for land clearing. But Brazil’s space research centre, the Instituto Nacional de Pesquisas Espaciais (INPE), detected 4,000 new forest fires over the next 48 hours. As charred and smouldering tree trunks pile up on the ground, a thick smoke mixed with soot and ash chokes the atmosphere and has triggered health emergency among communities. The states of Acre and Amazonas, which almost entirely remain covered by the tropical jungle, have declared a state of emergency. Analysts say the worst is yet to come. The number of fires will increase over the coming months as the dry season intensifies.
"I WILL NO LONGER ADMIT IBAMA GOES OUT FINING," BOLSONARO HAD SAID DURING THE ELECTION CAMPAIGNS. THIS HAS ENCOURAGED LAND GRABBERS TO BURN THE RAINFOREST WITH A SENSE OF IMPUNITY
AMAZON IS NOT new to fires. “Being a humid rainforest, it does not catch fire easily, unlike the dry bushlands in California or Australia,” says Christian Poirier of non-profit Amazon Watch. A vast majority of the fires are thus humaninduced, either deliberately or accidentally. Every year, as the dry season begins in August and continues till October, people set the undergrowth and scrub vegetation ablaze to make space for agriculture, pastures and other developments. While Brazil allows the slash-and-burn method for subsistence farming, ranchers, loggers and commercial farmers often use it illegally to encroach on forest areas. They fell trees, wait for the trunks to desiccate and then torch them. Sometimes, these blazes get out of control.
But the fires recorded this year have been unprecedented, both in terms of scale and intensity. Till September 7, INPE had recorded over 102,786 fires across Brazil—this was the highest since it began keeping records in 2013 and a 45 per cent increase on the same period last year. More than half of these cases were inside the Amazon.
Conservationists and world leaders put the blame squarely on Brazil’s newly elected president Jair Bolsonaro, who made campaign promises to restore the economy by opening up the Amazon’s natural resources for mining, logging and commercial agriculture. Under the Paris Agreement, Brazil has committed to achieve zero illegal deforestation in the Amazon by 2030 to meet its climate goals. But since assuming power in January, Bolsonaro has defunded several institutions, including the Brazilian Institute of Environment and Renewable Natural Resources (IBAMA), which is responsible for fighting fires and arresting perpetrators. “I will no longer admit IBAMA goes out fining,” Bolsonaro had said during the election campaigns. Fines imposed by IBAMA this year are at an 11-year low. This, say conservationists, has encouraged land grabbers to burn the rainforest like never before with a sense of impunity.
Around early August, local farmers in the Amazonian state of Pará placed an advertisement in a local newspaper calling for a queimada or “Day of Fire” on August 10 and organised large-scale slash-and-burn operations. “They not only cleared land for agriculture, but also burned intact areas of rainforest. More than 80 of them have now been identified to have links with traders and landlords,” says Shaji Thomas, environmental scientist who lives in Pará and has been
working in the Amazon for 25 years. Data with INPE shows the fires have intensified from then on. Aline Carrara, a Brazilian social scientist and conservationist, says in Pará’s Novo Progresso municipality, forest fires increased 300 per cent from the previous day. In other municipalities, such as Altamira and São Félix do Xingu, the fires increased 179 per cent and 328 per cent in three days. The Governor of Pará has publicly stated that ranchers provoked these fires.
By August 19, the giant black cloud of smoke and soot had crossed half of the continent and darkened the afternoon skies of Sao Paulo, pressing the panic button among world leaders, scientists and activists. Later that month, the European Space Agency (ESA) astronaut Luca Parmitano captured images of smoke from the International Space Station and said the haze is so widespread that it resembles clouds in some photos.
BOLSONARO HAS repeatedly dismissed accusations of being responsibile for the fires. On August 21, his environment minister tweeted that the fires are driven by “dry weather, wind and heat”. Experts have denounced the claim. On August 23 the Amazon Environmental Research Institute (IPAM), a research and policy institute in Brazil, released a technical paper, which says, though 2019 has been a dry season, it has been milder than in previous years and the moisture levels in the Amazon are currently above average compared to the last three years. Yet, the number of registered hotspots in the Amazon this year is already 60 per cent greater than the levels seen over last three years. SO, the only other plausible explanation is, says the IPAM report, deforestation is fanning the flames.
Ahead of the dry season, INPE, which has been tracking deforestation in realtime since the 1970s using satellite data, did try to the alert the government about increasing deforestation in the Amazon. In June, it released a damning report which showed that the scale of areas cleared has been creeping up since January, with a spike of 88 per cent in June compared to a year ago. The data turned the international spotlight on Bolsonaro’s controversial plans to open up the Amazon
to industry, Bolsonaro called INPE’s findings “lies” and said they were harmful for trade negotiations. By the first week of August, director of INPE Ricardo Galvão was sacked. Though INPE continued to operate, deforestation data available on its website remained frozen for nearly a month. It seems INPE resumed releasing the data after the Federal Public Ministry (FPM), in charge of federal crimes and federal civil activities, asked the government to provide evidence that INPE’s data is unreliable. FPM has also initiated a probe into why IBAMA is contracting a new satellite system for deforestation monitoring.
Thomas says there have been attempts by earlier governments to exploit the Amazon. In 1964, the military government wanted to “occupy” the Amazon ignoring that it is home to indigenous communities. Since then, successive governments have set up several large hydro-electric and mining projects in the heart of the forest. The agro-business and wood industries, supported by public funding, have caused large-scale deforestation in the region; small- and large-scale gold mining projects have contaminated the Amazon river with mercury. However, civil society and non-profits were able to keep some sort of tab on the actions of the government. Estimates show deforestation in the Amazon had declined by 77 per cent between 2005 and 2012—from 20,000 sq km to 4,600 sq km. “This year, the new government has brought in a new agenda that favours agro-business. But it has radically reduced monitoring of the Amazon. It is in fact giving incentives to environmental department to not fine illegal actions by landlords and traders in the Amazon,” says Thomas. INPE data shows, till August 31 this year, deforestation had increased to 6,159 sq km—the highest in a decade. Some 602 sq km of forests have been felled in protected areas. “What’s worse, damage done to the forest is an incomprehensible mystery to most,” Thomas says.
THE EXTENT OF damage, however, is not a mystery to Bolsonaro and those profiting from deforestation. Earlier in April, Amazon Watch published a report, titled “Complicity in Destruction II: How Northern consumers and financiers enable Bolsonaro’s assault on the Brazilian Amazon”. It says, Brazil’s economy, emerging from a three-year recession, is increasingly depe
ndent on foreign markets via investment. “These foreign investors have enormous influence over what happens in the Brazilian Amazon. Big banks and large investment companies play a critical role, providing billions of dollars in lending, underwriting, and equity investment to soy and cattle companies.” This capital and financial security enables Brazilian agribusiness to expand operations, causing further devastation to the Amazon. In recent years, Brazil has emerged as the world’s largest exporter of beef and soy. It accounts for 20 per cent of the global beefexport market. But its impact on the rainforest is disproportionately higher. Cattle ranching leads to 80 per cent of Amazon desforestation in Brazil.
Together, Brazil and its nearest rival, the US, account for 83 per cent of the global soy export, with the EU and China as their biggest markets. As trade wars intensify between the US and China, observers say China’s dependency on Brazil’s soy-export market will grow further, accelerating conversion of forests into farms. Though the country has a moratorium in place since 2006 which prohibits purchasing of soy produced on illegally deforested lands, the moratorium is only as strong as the government’s ability to monitor it.
The Bolsonaro government has already said that it would pave the controversial BR-163 highway, which is the main route connecting the grain belt of central Brazil, particularly the largest soy producing state Mato Grosso, and the Northern Arc of ports on the Amazon river, used for distribution of the grains across the world. Though the route has existed for over four decades, it has remained largely unpaved, making it impassable during the rainy season. Bolsonaro has also promised to complete it before the deadline of 2020 and extend it by hundreds of kilometres. As revealed by The Intercept, the BR-163 is directly linked with extensive deforestation of the Amazon, not only through the construction of the highway itself, but also by encouraging development and
clearing of lands in the areas around it. In 2017, a Financial Times report said, “Every year between 2004 and 2013— except 2005—while deforestation in Amazonia as a whole fell, it increased in the region around the BR-163.” Its extension and pavement work will be majorly handled by two Brazilian firms, owned by Blackstone, a US investment giant that is a top donor to US President Donald Trump and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell.
LEADERS ACROSS BRAZIL are watching the fires in dismay. “Throughout history we have had difficult situations, but this is the first time we have a situation that was practically and officially fuelled by the government,” Marina Silva, former Brazilian environment minister and presidential candidate, recently told a conference on sustainable development in Bogota. “It’s a situation I regard to be a crime against the homeland, a crime against humanity,” she said.
Outside the country, the fires have triggered a major diplomatic crisis. European leaders have reacted with anger, calling the fires a worldwide crisis. “Our house is burning,” tweeted French president Emmanuel Macron, as he called for emergency talks on the subject at the annual G-7 summit of the world’s largest democracies held in the last week of August and offered US $22 million to help fight Amazon fires. It was one of the few concrete achievements to come out of the summit. But it immediately incited a verbal sparring between the two leaders, with Bolsonaro initially rejecting the paltry offer and then saying that Macron had a “colonialist mentality”. The squabble has now spilled to the economic arena, with France, Ireland and Finland threatening to amend the Mercosur trade deal, which allows increased access of the South American bloc, Mercosur, to the European market for agricultural goods, notably for beef, poultry, sugar and ethanol. There are proposals that the EU should consider banning the import of Brazilian beef and
soy as a punitive measure. Earlier, soon after INPE released satellite data showing increasing deforestation, Norway and Germany had halted donations to the Brazilian government’s Amazon Fund. The fund was established in 2008 under the mechanism for REDD+ (Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation) to protect the rainforest. Norway has also urged its companies to make sure that they are not contributing to destruction of the Amazon.
THIS HUGE BACKLASH from across the globe is not unwarranted. The world has a vested interest in the rainforest as what happens in it has global implications.
Spread over 5.5 million sq km, Amazon is home to at least 40,000 plant species, 427 mammals, 1,300 birds, 378 reptiles, more than 400 amphibians, around 3,000 freshwater fishes and 100,000 invertebrate species. According to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the UN, the Amazon holds over half of the terrestrial species of animals, plants and insects and is home to some 420 indigenous communities which play a key role in conservation of this biodiversity. The Amazon is also an important buffer against rising levels of CO , much of which is absorbed by vegetation 2 as it grows. Climate models suggest that it acts as a large carbon sink by absorbing a quarter of the carbon taken up by forests worldwide every year. If burnt, says Uma Charan Mohanty, meteorologist and an emeritus professor at the School of Earth, Ocean and Climate Sciences of the Indian Institute of Technology, Bhubaneswar, the Amazon could become a net emitter. Burning releases huge loads of CO2 and black carbon or soot. The loss of green cover will reduce its capacity to absorb CO2 and produce oxygen. Together, they exacerbate global warming.
This ecosystem service is of high importance to European countries. In July, while taking over the presidency of the European Council, Finland Prime Minister Antti Rinne, said: “Solving the climate crisis could be Europe’s next heroic act, one that will be admired and praised by future generations.” Besides, reducing forest degradation in the Amazon allows them to clean up their own act. Under REDD+, countries can offset their carbon emissions and achieve climate goals by financing forest protection and sustainable
development elsewhere. This is precisely the reason, industry-heavy Norway and Germany are the largest contributors to the Amazon Fund.
Besides, Amazon is a hydrological powerhouse. Every tree here is a fountain, sucking water through its roots and releasing vapour into the atmosphere. These vapours form clouds and create rainfall hundreds or even thousands of kilometres away. Arie Staal of Wageningen University in the Netherlands reported earlier this year that one-third of the rain falling in the Amazon basin comes from moisture generated within the basin, mostly by transpiring trees (see ‘The Amazon recycles water’ on p42). But frequent forest fires in the times of climate change are pushing the ecosystem to a tipping point, or the point beyond which changes to the ecosystem become irreversible.
A recent evaluation by Carlos Nobre of the Brazilian Academy of Sciences, headquartered in Rio de Janeiro, shows the tipping point could occur with as low as 20 to 25 per cent of forest conversion. Since 1985, the Amazon has lost 400,000 sq km of vegetation cover, or 17 per cent of its original area, says online database MapBiomas. “Post-deforestation climate will no longer be a wet climate like the Amazon. It will become drier and have a much longer dry season, like the long dry seasons in the savannas in the tropics in Africa, South America and Asia,” Nobre told Yale Environment 360, published at the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies, USA.
But for Bolsonaro, Amazon fires is “an internal issue”. His retorts have reignited a perennial debate: how does one protect something that has value to the world but falls within the borders of a country? Finding a solution is vital at a time when
several other ecosystems are heading towards similar tipping points, either because of climate change or human activities.
HALFWAY ACROSS THE world, the Arctic region is also burning at a historic pace. Since July, fire has charred about 2.4 million ha of Siberian forest. In Alaska, fires have consumed 1 million ha tundra and snow forests. Although wildfires are common in the northern hemisphere between May and October, the latitude and intensity of these fires, as well as the length of time that they have been burning for, has been particularly unusual, according to Mark Parrington, senior scientist and wildfires expert with Copernicus Atmosphere Monitoring Service (CAMS) of ESA. While it is not known what has triggered fire in the Arctic, the region is warming twice as fast as the rest of the planet. This summer, parts of Alaska broke records: Anchorage reached a high of 32oC on July 4, when the average temperature for that date is 23oC. In Siberia, where wildfires are raging, the average June temperatures was almost 10oC higher than the 1981-2010 long-term average. “The heat is drying out forests and making them more susceptible to burn,” says a release by the World Meteorological Organization (WMO). Studies show a warming world would see more lightning events, and in remote areas they are a significant cause of fires.
These fires have serious consequences for the world. For instance, compared the Amazon rainforest, which stores about 320 tonnes of carbon per hectare (t/ha), tundra grasslands store 218-890 t/ha carbon. Along with the permafrost soil of tundra, the snow forest, also known as boreal forests, hold 1,700 gigatonnes of carbon (see ‘Up in smoke’, p46). The boreal forest ecosystem, which encircles the Earth just below the Arctic, covering large swathes of Russia, Canada and Alaska, is the biggest terrestrial carbon store in the world, says a 2015 research published in Global and Planetary Change.
ALMOST HALF OF THE ECOSYSTEMS ARE INTERLINKED. IF ONE CROSSES THE TIPPING POINT, THE RISK RISES FOR OTHER ECOSYSTEMS TOO. THIS WILL TRIGGER A WHOLE CASCADE OF DISASTERS
Unlike tropical forests, where carbon is mostly stored in trees above ground, 95 per cent of carbon in boreal forest is stored in ground—in permafrost soil and peatlands. In fact, 80 per cent of the world’s peatlands are found in the boreal region. In case of wildfire, in addition to trees and grassland, peat also burns, releasing much more CO2 than trees. As per WMO, since the start of June CAMS has tracked over 100 intense and long-lived wildfires in the Arctic. In June alone, these fires emitted 50 megatonnes of CO2 into the atmosphere, equivalent to Sweden’s annual emissions. This is more than what was released by Arctic fires in the same month between 2010 and 2018 combined.
Wildfires in the pristine Arctic can have a domino effect. Particles of smoke can land on snow and ice, causing the ice to absorb sunlight that it would otherwise reflect, and thereby accelerating the warming in the Arctic. Fires in the Arctic also increase the risk of further permafrost thawing that releases methane, which is also a greenhouse gas, says WMO.
The repercussions are clearly palpable at places where ecosystems have passed the tipping point. One such is the Caribbean reefs. In the 1980-90s, scientists noticed these reefs to have degraded and overrun with algae. Long-term overfishing and nutrient runoff in a warming world eroded their resilience to recover from hurricanes and disease. By the turn of the century, it became clear that reestablishing healthy coral communities would be difficult, if not impossible, in our lifetimes.
“The world is a much more surprising place than generally assumed,” says Garry Peterson of Stockholm Resilience Centre in Sweden. His team has analysed 30 ecosystems with potential tipping points and has found almost half of them are linked. Crossing one tipping point increases the risk of crossing another and so triggering a whole cascade of disasters. And, says Peterson, “we may not even recognise the danger until it is too late”.