Fire in the lungs of the earth
How bad are the Amazon fires, and who started them? Lia Timson explains the implications for Brazil and the world.
Fires are raging in the Brazilian Amazon rainforest, known affectionately as the lungs of the Earth, and the citizens of the world, including European and United Nations leaders, are worried.
Are the fires natural? Are they criminal? Are they caused by climate change? And what does the ‘‘Trump of the Tropics’’ have to do with it?
What’s happening in the Amazon?
Large expanses of the Amazon are ablaze and smoke has reached urban centres such as Sao Paulo and Belo Horizonte hundreds of kilometres away.
The Amazon rainforest covers 5.5 million square kilometres over several countries: from the middle of Brazil to Colombia, Venezuela, Guyana, Suriname and French Guyana to the north; and Peru, Colombia and Ecuador in the west.
The Brazilian Amazon forest accounts for 60 per cent of the total Amazon and spreads over nine states, the larger of which is, confusingly, also called Amazon (Amazonas in Portuguese).
There is at present not one large bushfire but thousands of fires spread all over the Brazilian Amazon – in particular, along the southern edges of the rainforest where it reaches into Para, Mato Grosso and Rondonia states.
Illegal land clearing is a grim reality in Brazil – graziers, miners and large industrial farming concerns have been clearing land in these states for decades to satisfy demand for soybean crops, cattle grazing and gold and other minerals. Agriculture is the biggest factor in deforestation. But the record number of fires detected by the Brazilian Space Agency INPE in the first seven months of this year, the satellite images and the smoke have brought the issue to the world’s attention.
The effects have been felt well beyond the rainforests. Brazil’s mega-metropolis Sao Paulo (population 21.5m, area 7900sq km) went dark in the middle of the afternoon on August 19. It is some 1400km from the forest.
A frenzy of social media posts, hashtags, accusations and media articles followed, making claim and counter-claim about the cause of the phenomenon.
Hysterics aside, it appears some of the smoke from the Amazon fires did reach Sao Paulo and other areas in the southeast, following the natural path of the Amazonian ‘‘flying rivers’’. It created a smoke cloud corridor seen in satellite images moving southeasterly.
Meteorologists, however, are cautious about pointing to the smoke as the only cause for the darkness. They say it was more likely it met a cold front and created the unusual darkness.
According to the European Union’s Copernicus Climate Change Service, the fires have led to a clear spike in carbon monoxide emissions, as well as the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide (CO2), posing a threat to human health and aggravating global warming, The Washington
Post reported.
Why is the Amazon so valuable?
By some accounts, the rainforest sequesters 70 billion tonnes of CO2, benefiting the entire planet. It stores some of this in the soil, working as a carbon sink. Through photosynthesis, it transforms the rest into oxygen, which is pumped back into the atmosphere.
The rainforest also produces copious amounts of moisture – water vapour that falls again locally as rain but that also travels in what is known as ‘‘flying rivers’’ or atmospheric rivers. These air currents carry Amazon moisture to the rest of Brazil, parts of South America and, according to some scientists, across the Atlantic to parts of Africa and Europe where, in turn, it brings on rain.
Former Brazilian environment minister Jose Sarney Filho says this moisture system makes Brazil not so much the lungs of the world as its air-conditioning.
When the forest burns, it not only stops removing harmful gases from the atmosphere and producing oxygen and rain, it actually produces more CO2, adding to pollution and greenhouse gases.
Are the fires the result of climate change?
Everything that happens in the Amazon affects and is affected by the planet’s climate. Tropical rainforests enjoy two, rather than four, annual seasons – the dry and the wet (some scientists say this used to be ‘‘wet and wetter’’).
It is mostly moist all the time, except for deforested areas, which are now experiencing less rain and, consequently, less water volume in rivers. Some areas have had to curb irrigation, and food production has been affected. But the Amazon is not in drought.
The dry season is, however, the most efficient time of the year to conduct ‘‘queimadas’’, or burns. For thousands of years, indigenous people have used queimadas selectively to grow food without burning down the entire forest. The queimadas seen from space in modern times are deliberately lit for land redevelopment – mostly illegally.
From January to July, INPE recorded more than 74,000 burns in Brazil, half of them in the Amazon, compared with slightly fewer than 40,000 in the same period last year – an increase of 83 per cent. This compares with nearly 68,000 blazes in the same period in 2016, when the country suffered severe drought conditions resulting from a strong El Nino.
INPE’s satellite images spotted 9507 new forest fires in the Amazon over five days just last week.
‘‘There is nothing abnormal about the climate this year, or the rainfall in the Amazon region, which is just a little below average,’’ INPE’s chief scientist, fire surveillance, Alberto Setzer said. ‘‘The dry season creates the favourable
conditions for the use and spread of fire, but starting a fire is the work of humans, either deliberately or by accident.’’
Danilo de Urzedo, a forestry engineer and PhD candidate at the University of Sydney, has spent years studying the Brazilian rainforest and working to reverse deforestation by planting. He says an increase in greenhouse gases helps increase temperatures in deforested areas, in turn heating up the soil, contributing to the spread of fires and the degradation of water quality.
‘‘Tropical forests are also very
sensitive to global changes in temperature and to increased greenhouse gases. It’s all interconnected.’’
How did the fires start?
Evidence points to agricultural businesses. Indigenous leaders and activists have been warning about the destruction of the Amazon for decades. In fact, the last time the world was as concerned about the destruction of the Amazon was in 2004, when it hit peak deforestation rates.
Concerted efforts by indigenous leaders, activists and environmentalists then saw the
government adopt mitigating policies, including the establishment of leading-edge, real-time monitoring systems, some partly funded by European countries.
From 2004 to 2014, Brazil enjoyed a 70 per cent decrease in deforestation, according to Urzedo, as a direct result of domestic environmental policies and the oversight of countries such as Norway and Germany through the Amazon Fund.
But from 2014, an economic and political crisis coincided with a rise in deforestation, culminating in the current numbers after the election of
Right-wing Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro.
Urzedo says the fires are definitely not a natural phenomenon. He says it reflects the areas cleared for pasture and recent changes in Brazilian environmental politics.
‘‘Fires can start naturally in the areas where the Cerrado joins the tropical forest, but they reflect the areas already cleared to turn forest into pasture.
‘‘The areas are illegally chosen – first for trees of large economic worth, sold illegally, then the fires open up the land, then comes the conversion from forest to grazing land for farming.’’
Does this spell doom for the Amazon?
In his 2013 book The Falling Sky – Words of a Yanomami Shaman,
Kopenawa Yanomami, a shaman and spokesman for the Yanomami people of Brazil, predicted an ecological collapse arising from the destruction of his people and the Amazon forest – this he called the time of the ‘‘falling sky’’. Many a social media user referenced this to declare last week’s urban darkness a prophecy fulfilled.
Asked about it on August 22, Kopenawa said: ‘‘We talked about this. Indigenous people talk, we try to teach, try to make people think, but people don’t believe us, they keep knocking down the trees.
‘‘I too can see the smoke, the yellow air, the yellow ground. Sickness is coming.’’
Kopenawa said he wanted to see Amazon policies that are sustainable. Asked if he was tired of repeating the same message over decades, he replied: ‘‘I’m not tired. I’ll say it once more for city people to understand: What is the forest? The forest is health, for the Brazilian people, for all the people.’’
In a video published by the German Environment Ministry, the Brazil space agency’s Setzer says the future of the Amazon is in politicians’ hands. ‘‘The difficulty today is not technical any more; we know precisely what’s being deforested, how, where and by whom. What remains to be done is the political will to stop deforestation and forest fires in Brazil.’’
The German Government also hinted at Europe’s ability to demand change through trade, or curbs to it, in order to prevent the devastating effects of the destruction of the Amazon.
Brazilian Cabinet ministers are concerned that Brazil’s status as a major commodities and beef exporter is threatened, and have called urgent meetings to discuss the situation.
Brazil’s new trade pact with Europe ties the country to the Paris accord under which it is committed to delivering 12m hectares of reforestation in the Amazon. An increase in deforestation makes it harder for that goal to be met, directly threatening trade. –