With the number of fires in the Amazon 80 per cent higher than in 2023, has the rainforest reached its tipping point, after which it will became savannah and desert with calamitous implications for climate, rainfall and food across the entire planet?
São Paulo, 18 October 2024: For the last three months, fires have raged all over the Amazon and other Brazilian biomes affecting an area larger than the country of Belarus. Rivers in the Amazon basin are at their lowest level ever, huge clouds of smoke full of soot particles have covered large parts of the country, hiding the sun, polluting the water and making it undrinkable.
Millions of animals, insects, reptiles and birds have been burned to death or died of thirst in a mass extinction that has gone unrecorded. Slow moving animals like sloths have no chance against the speed of the flames, often fanned by strong winds.
Human beings also suffer, as the drought leaves communities isolated, rivers too shallow for most boats to navigate, children unable to get to school, people unable to buy food or sell their produce or go to the doctor.
The Amazon population is being forced to breathe soot-filled smoke, equivalent to ‘smoking four to five cigarettes a day’, said Dr Sandra Hacon of Fiocruz (Fundacão Oswaldo Cruz, public health institute linked to the Ministry of Health). That means four or five a day since July.
Up to mid-October the number of fires in the Amazon basin in 2024 was almost 80 per cent higher than the year before, with 220,000 hotspots. These fires make up over half of this year’s fires in Brazil, with three states, Pará, Mato Grosso, and Tocantins concentrating 56 per cent of the total. Ironically Pará will be the site of next year’s COP30.
Tropical forests, being humid, do not normally burn, except where they have been degraded and dried out because they are exposed to the sun, with no canopy to protect them. This means that most of the fires are criminal, lit by farmers who want to clear the forest to plant soy or raise cattle. Indigenous communities, who have traditionally protected their reserves, making them oases of trees in the midst of deforestation, have been forced to create their own firefighting brigades to protect not only the forest, but their own homes.
Too little, too late
The government has just introduced a bill to increase the penalties for illegal fires, and promised more funds for firefighting and prevention. But it seems like too little, too late because they are fighting not only the effects of climate change and the land-grabbing of private companies, but the take over of much of the Amazon region by criminal factions. The government is also contributing to deforestation and environmental degradation by pushing ahead with major projects like the Ferrogrão railway to carry grain exports from Mato Grosso to river ports, the paving of the BR319 highway from Porto Velho to Manaus and drilling for oil in the Amazon basin, ignoring the protests of indigenous and environmental groups.
Many of the local elected officials in the nine states of the Amazon region are linked to the economic activities that are destroying it, such as mining, soya farming and logging. Some mayors have even refused federal funding to fight fires, because they still see the rainforest as an obstacle, not a resource.
All this means that the Amazon rainforest has possibly reached its tipping point, when it transforms into savannah. El Nino and global heating have played a part in the drought, but the manmade fires which have ravaged it for three months have not allowed it to recover. It is no longer a carbon sink, removing Co2 from the atmosphere, but is instead becoming a carbon emitter. The famous ‘rios voadores’, or flying rivers that carried moisture from the Amazon to the centre and southeast of Brazil, bringing rain to farmers, have been replaced with “ smoke ducts” or soot-filled clouds kilometres long, which in the first week of September covered 60 per cent of Brazil’s entire land mass.
A vicious circle has been created: more fires, more drought, less rain, less carbon capture, more emissions, drier soils, less productivity. Brazil, home to the world’s largest tropical forest, richest biodiversity and 20 per cent of the world’s freshwater, is transforming itself into a land of savannah and desert, of polluted cities and sick populations, gasping for clean air.
LAB has just published a new book, The Amazon in Times of War, by Marcos Colón, being formally launched in London on 19 October 2024. While the book mainly addresses the harms to the Amazon and its people inflicted by the Bolsonaro presidency, many of the actions and policies described foreshadow what is happening now.
