Melting ice ‘could wipe out polar bears by 2100’
FIRES rage across a large swathe of Brazil’s precious Amazon rainforest despite strict laws to protect it.
Shocking images released today reveal the smouldering land left clear of trees in a vast forest often described as the lungs of the world.
An environmental campaigner said lack of action to protect the rainforest was putting the climate and lives at risk.
Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro banned the use of fires to clear tracts of land for agricultural use for 120 days from July 1. But footage obtained by
POLAR bears are in danger of becoming extinct within 80 years, research warns.
Melting sea ice is forcing the animals on to land where they are deprived of food and must live off stored fat.
The threshold for how long they can fast, before cub and adult survival reduces rapidly, may have been reached.
The findings are based on examining feeding, growth and reproduction plus their response to global warming, over almost four decades.
Study author Dr Peter Molnar said: “Our model shows recruitment and survival impact thresholds may already have been exceeded
Greenpeace Brazil from July 7 to 10 show fires raging throughout the state of Mato Grosso. The pressure group also documented images of areas already burned and others readied for clearance.
It found 4,437 hotspots in Mato Grosso alone or half of all fires in the Brazilian Amazon this year. Mr Bolsonaro has been accused of encouraging land grabs with plans to weaken laws protecting the environment. But after coming under in some sub-populations. It also suggests that, with high greenhouse gas emissions, steeply declining reproduction and survival will jeopardise the persistence of all but a few high-Arctic subpopulations by 2100.”
Rising temperatures and fossil-fuel extraction are forcing them from traditional hunting grounds on to the shore where food is scarce.
It was reported this year that polar bears have been seen feeding on each other as they lose their habitat.
Dr Molnar, a scientist at Toronto University in Canada, said: “Polar bears require sea ice for capturing seals.”
There are only 26,000 left divided into 19 “sub-populations” across the Arctic. In the southernmost area, they are forced ashore in summer.
Dr Molnar, whose results are published in Nature Climate Change, added: “Prolonged ice absence from productive continental shelf waters also forces increasingly long fasts in eco-regions where bears historically continued foraging on perennial ice through summer.”
The bears, weighing up to 125st and measuring up to 10ft long, are the world’s largest land carnivore. international pressure he ordered a ban on fires in the peak of the dry season.
Romulo Batista, Greenpeace Brazil Amazon campaigner, said: “Those calling on the Brazilian government to act cannot fool themselves.
“These images, along with the record deforestation rates this year, are the intended outcome of Bolsonaro’s long-term strategy for the Amazon.
“His government has been dismantling environmental protection laws and kneecapping the power of the environmental protection agencies since he took office. They have even used the Covid-19 pandemic as a smokescreen to further enable deforestation, logging and mining.
“This administration is doing nothing but putting the climate and more lives at risk, especially those of Indigenous peoples.
“Protecting the capacity to monitor and stop destruction and to enforce the law is essential.”
Greenpeace said last month 2,248 fires were recorded in the Amazon, a 20 per cent increase compared with last June.