Special Edition: Fires in the Amazon
Hello, Scouts. As I’m sure you’ve seen, there are fires raging in the Amazon Rainforest right now. They have been burning for several weeks, and the smoke from the fires has been visible from space for about a week now. While I’m glad that people in the U.S.A. are starting to talk about the fires, I’ve also seen a lot of misinformation being shared. I’ve read about 15 articles from news agencies, non-profits, and scientists and gathered together everything you need to know about the fires in the Amazon.
What is the Amazon?
The Amazon is the biggest rainforest in the world, and is located in South America. The rainforest is roughly half the size of the United States and is home to countless plants, animals, and indigenous peoples. According to the World Atlas, “one in ten known species in the world lives in the Amazon Rainforest as do one in five known bird species.” More than ⅔ of the Amazon is located within Brazil, but it does stretch across other South American countries including Peru, Ecuador, Columbia, and Venezuela. The Amazon Rainforest is very important to the global climate because it is a carbon sink, meaning it removes more carbon from the atmosphere than it produces. Because forests are carbon sinks, they are instrumental in the fight against climate change.
What’s happening in the Amazon right now?
More than 74,000 fires have occurred this year in Brazil, most of which have occurred in the Amazon region. Roughly half of these fires have started in the last month. That’s 83% more fires in July of this year than in July of last year. At the current rate, in every minute of the day one and a half football fields of rainforest burns, according to Brazil’s National Institute for Space Research (INPE). Smoke from these fires is darkening the skies in cities like Sao Paulo from more than 1700 miles away. That’s like smoke from a fire in Denver, Colorado clouding the sky in New York City. That’s crazy! Photos of this on social media have caused an uptick in international news reports on the fires, even though they’ve already been burning for weeks. In addition to plants and animals dying and being forced out of their habitat, many of the hundreds of thousands of indigenous peoples who live in the Amazon are also being driven out of their ancestral homelands. Indigenous peoples are often disproportionately affected by ecological disasters like fires, floods, and even changes like the damming of rivers.
Are these fires normal?
In short, no. The long answer is a little more complex. Many headlines have said there is a “record-breaking” number of fires. This is a tricky claim because it refers to the records kept by the INPE. This institute has been tracking the extent of the Amazon since the 1970s, but has only been recording the number of fires in the Amazon since 2013. So when people say the number of fires this year is record-breaking, they are only comparing this year to six other years. Still, the fires this year are significant. Some sources say that July 2019 had 300% more deforestation than the same month last year.
Wildfires in general are a normal and necessary part of nature that can renew life, but the fires in the Amazon are not these types of fires. Environmentalists say that the fires burning now are mostly caused by humans, which is not surprising. Even though burning is illegal in the Amazon in Brazil, it is a common practice used by subsistence farmers, ranchers, and land developers. In fact, cattle ranching accounts for roughly 80% of deforestation in the region, which includes deforestation by illegal burning. In the 1990s and early 2000s, there were even higher rates of deforestation in the Amazon than there are now, but Brazil began programs to better monitor and police illegal deforestation and imparted hefty penalties on those who broke the rules. These efforts slowed down deforestation by 80% from 2005-2014. Over the last 5 years, however, those programs were scaled down and Brazilian leaders like Bolsonaro have favored economic interests over environmental ones. This brings us to our next topic:
How does the president of Brazil fit into all of this?
Strap in, Scouts, because this gets a little messy. About 17% of the amazon rainforest has been deforested by humans in the last 50 years. Reasons for this include clearing and/or burning land for farming, ranching, logging, and development. Like I said above, deforestation slowed down significantly between 2005-2014. Then the protective policies started being scaled back, until the current president, Bolsonaro (nicknamed “Captain Chainsaw” by some), took big steps to roll back environmental policies and slashed funding to environmental agencies in an effort to bolster Brazil’s economy. Deforestation has soared since the far-right climate skeptic Bolsonaro took office in January of this year. Since President Bolsonaro took office, he has promised to remain in the Paris climate accord, but other countries have questioned his commitment. Germany and Norway froze a combined $72 million in aid that had been earmarked for sustainability projects and programs that fight deforestation in the Amazon. Bolsonaro didn’t seem to be concerned, and even told Norway that they could keep their money and instead “reforest Germany,” apparently showing no concern for the fact that the Amazon rainforest specifically is absolutely crucial in the fight against climate change.
About three weeks ago, Ricardo Galvao (the director of the INPE), said that recent satellite images show deforestation in the Amazon was 88% higher this June than last June. Bolsonaro alleged that Galvao was lying and fired him from the INPE. I find it worth mentioning that in addition to these highly questionable actions, Bolsonaro appointed an environmental minister who was convicted last year of fraud for changing an environmental protection plan to instead favor mining ventures. This man, Ricardo Salles, has said that this year’s fires might be due to dry weather, but recent years have had much worse droughts and still fewer fires than are burning this year.
Bolsonaro himself has blamed NGOs, or non-governmental organizations (think organizations like Greenpeace) for intentionally starting the fires, but he has provided no evidence for these claims and has refused to name any organization. He alleged that these unnamed organizations just want to cause problems in Brazil because the Brazilian government did not grant them funding. Again, there has been zero evidence provided to support these claims. Groups like the Amazon Environmental Research Institute and Amazon Watch say that the fires are instead likely caused by those illegally clearing land to create pastures.
Why should you care about these fires?
The amazon rainforest is sometimes called the lungs of the earth, and many news articles have been reporting that it provides 20% of the world’s oxygen. This is not actually true. About half of atmospheric oxygen comes from photosynthesis by phytoplankton in the ocean! The other half is produced by photosynthesis on land, and the Amazon accounts for roughly 6% of global oxygen production according to scientists like Dr. Jonathan Foley, who has published over 130 peer-reviewed scientific articles about climate and the environment.
So are these fires a threat to our oxygen? No. Are they a threat to the climate? Absolutely. The amazon sinks millions of tons of carbon emissions every single year. If you’ve read What’s So Bad About Carbon Dioxide?, I don’t have to tell you why that’s a big deal! The Amazon Rainforest has a tipping point, or a point of no return. That means that when deforestation through clearing or burning reaches a certain amount, the rainforest will not be able to recover and would instead turn into a dry savanna, like the landscape of northern Africa. This would mean that most of its wildlife and plants would not be able to live there any longer. The region could even start emitting carbon dioxide instead of being a sink for it. This would be an absolute environmental crisis. That’s why we should be concerned about the long-term effects of these fires and deforestation in general. There are many efforts to plant more trees so that we can decrease the amount of carbon in the atmosphere and fight climate change, but now we are losing a big chunk of the biggest rainforest in the world.
What can be done to help the Amazon?
The fires in the Amazon will likely be a big topic at the upcoming G7 Summit where the leaders of the 7 biggest economies of the world meet to discuss global goals. That’s great, but the world needs more than just discussion. We need reforestation all over the globe to help combat carbon emissions in addition to buffers against the tipping point in the Amazon. We also need to take a harder look at practices like beef production that require huge amounts of land and lead to deforestation.
What can you do?
Avoid buying beef from Brazilian producers unless it’s certified by a group like the Rainforest Alliance. (Beef producers are a big part of those clearing the Amazon for pasture)
Donate to organizations that support forests like Amazon Conservation Team, Amazon Conservation Association, or Rainforest Trust. These organizations have been given 4 out of 5 starts by a third-party non-profit that rates charities on financial health, transparency, and accountability.
Urge your elected representatives to prioritize the Amazon by blocking trade deals with countries that practice deforestation and rewarding countries that expand their tree cover. Not sure how to talk to your officials? Check out this article on writing or calling your representatives.
That’s (almost) it for today’s special edition. While researching, I came across this quote from Ricardo Galvao that I loved. It’s from an interview with Scientific American that Galvao gave after he was fired as director of the INPE, and it’s what I want to leave you with:
“Global warming is not a question anymore. The question is the anthropic effect on global warming, and that, obviously, is still a matter of discussion. That is a matter that can be solved only with scientific studies, and scientific data, and scientific simulations. Politicians should have no role in that, no role at all. They should use only the results of science to establish their strategies, what to do as a country under those situations, how to control that. But do not fight against the findings of science because there simply aren’t results. You can contest it if you have a better model, if you have other data. If you don’t have other data, just forget it. Don’t be silly and attack science.”
Here are the articles I referenced in this article.
https://weather.com/news/news/2019-08-22-amazon-rainforest-fires#9
https://edition.cnn.com/2019/08/21/americas/amazon-rainforest-fire-intl-hnk-trnd/index.html
https://nypost.com/2019/08/20/brazils-environmental-changes-under-a-far-right-climate-skeptic/
https://www.nationalgeographic.com/news/2004/6/source-of-half-earth-s-oxygen-gets-little-credit/
https://www.worldatlas.com/articles/what-animals-live-in-the-amazon-rainforest.html
