The coronavirus pandemic may have caused a global economic slowdown, but it hasn’t affected the rising rate of deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon rainforest. The destruction has continued unabated, and forest clearing over the past year has reached the highest level on record.
The country’s national space and research institute, INPE, has been keeping track and releasing the data publicly since 2007. According to DETER (INPE’s deforestation monitoring system), April 2020 was the 13th consecutive month that deforestation rose relative to year-earlier figures. That month, 406 square kilometers of the “legal Amazon” forest was lost, bringing the extent of deforestation measured to 9,320 square kilometers for the year (April 2019 – April 2020). That’s 40% higher than April 2018-April 2019 and double the number from April 2017- April 2018.
There was a time when things were beginning to look hopeful. Between 2004 and 2013, public and private sector efforts to curb forest clearing and the creation of indigenous territories and new protected areas, along with better forest monitoring and environmental law enforcement, all together helped instill a decline in deforestation. A study conducted in 2014 found that the reduction was equal to saving 3.2 billion tons of greenhouse gas emissions from entering the atmosphere. To illustrate, that’s the same as taking all cars off American roads for 36 months!
Unfortunately, the drop did not continue, and deforestation began to rise again with a particularly sharp rise starting since Jair Bolsonaro assumed the presidency last year. He places the short term economic gain above the preservation of the Amazon and has granted amnesty from fines for illegal deforestation, rolled back environmental regulations, cut budgets for environmental law enforcement, opened protected areas and indigenous territories for agribusiness and mining, and fired officials and indigenous people who were guarding the forest and against illegal land invasions. He has reversed all the things that were protecting the Amazon, also known as “the lungs of the earth.” The president has even diminished the role of scientists in the government since they shed light on the dangers of global warming and the importance of the rainforest.
For example, scientists have expressed concerns that the accelerating forest degradation and drought combined have staged the region for another active fire season. Furthermore, the rising forest clearance and abnormally dry conditions are bringing the Amazon to a tipping point where large areas of the wet rainforest could transition to savanna and dry tropical woodlands. If the conversion occurs, it may never recover.
Philip Fearnside, a National Institute of Amazonian Research professor, said:
It’s very important to keep repeating these concerns. There are a number of tipping points that are not far away. We can’t see exactly where they are, but we know they are very close. It means we have to do things right away. Unfortunately, that is not what is happening. There are people denying we even have a problem.
What the researchers mean by “tipping point” is the moment when trees are lost, and the forest loses its ability to make its own rainfall via evaporation and transpiration from plants. Without the wetness, the wood would transition to savannah – grassland that can’t grow trees. If this happens, it will have significant ramifications for global warming because we need trees to absorb carbon from the atmosphere.
