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Why Is The Amazon Burning
Why Is The Amazon Burning
“These are intentional fires to clear the forest,” Cathelijne Stoof, coordinator of
the Fire Center at Wageningen University (WUR) in the Netherlands, tells The
Verge. “People want to get rid of the forest to make agricultural land, for
people to eat meat.”
“There is no doubt that this rise in fire activity is associated with a sharp rise in
deforestation,” Paulo Artaxo, an atmospheric physicist at the University of São
Paulo, told Science Magazine. He explained that the fires are expanding along
the borders of new agricultural development, which is what’s often seen in
fires related to forest clearing.
Everyone on the planet benefits from the health of the Amazon. As its trees
take in carbon dioxide and release oxygen, the Amazon plays a huge role in
pulling planet-warming greenhouse gases out of the atmosphere. Without it,
climate change speeds up. But as the world’s largest rainforest is eaten away
by logging, mining, and agribusiness, it may not be able to provide the same
buffer.
“The Amazon was buying you some time that it is not going to buy anymore,”
Carlos Quesada, a scientist at Brazil’s National Institute for Amazonian
Research, told Public Radio International in 2018. Scientists warn that the
rainforest could reach a tipping point, turning into something more like a
savanna when it can no longer sustain itself as a rainforest. That would mean
it’s not able to soak up nearly as much carbon as it does now. And if the
Amazon as we know it dies, it wouldn’t go quietly. As the trees and plants
perish, they would release billions of tons of carbon that has been stored for
decades — making it nearly impossible to escape a climate catastrophe.
Of course, those nearest to the fires will bear the most immediate effects.
Smoke from the fires got so bad, it seemed to turn day into night in São
Paulo on August 20th. Residents say the air quality is still making it difficult to
breathe. On top of that, a massive global study on air pollution found that
among the two dozen countries it observed, Brazil showed one of the
sharpest increases in mortality rates whenever there’s more soot in the air.
And because fire isn’t a natural phenomenon in the region, it can have
outsized impacts on local plants and animals. One in ten of all animal species on
Earth call the Amazon home, and experts expect that they will be dramatically
affected by the fires in the short term. In the Amazon, plants and animals are
“exceptionally sensitive” to fire, Jos Barlow, a professor of conservation
science at Lancaster University in the UK, said to The Verge in an email.
According to Barlow, even low-intensity fires with flames just 30 centimeters
tall can kill up to half of the trees burned in a tropical rainforest.
About 60 percent of the Amazon can be found within Brazil’s borders, which
gives the nation a massive amount of influence over the region. Not
surprisingly, the fires have called international attention to the plight of the
Amazon and have turned up the heat on Bolsonaro’s environmental policies.
French President Emmanuel Macron took to Twitter to call for action, pushing
for emergency international talks on the Amazon at the G7 summit. On August
26th, the world’s seven largest economies offered Brazil more than $22 million
in aid to help it get the fires under control. Bolsonaro promptly turned down
the money, accusing Macron on Twitter of treating Brazil like a colony. Some
in Brazil, including Bolsonaro, see the international aid as an attack on Brazil’s
sovereignty, and its right to decide how to manage the land within its borders.
Bolsonaro has since said that he’ll reconsider the deal, as long as Macron
takes back his “insults” and Brazil has control over how the money is spent.
On the 27th, Bolsonaro accepted $12.2 million in aid from the UK.
Barroso and other experts agree that it’s important to look ahead to prevent
fires like we’re seeing now. After all, August is just the beginning of Brazil’s
largely manmade fire season, when slashing-and-burning in the country peaks
and coincides with drier weather.
Using planes to put out wildfires in the Amazon isn’t a typical method of
firefighting in tropical forests, and is likely to get expensive, Lancaster
University’s Jos Barlow tells The Verge. He says that large-scale fires in areas
cleared by deforestation “are best contained with wide firebreaks created with
bulldozers — not easy in remote regions.” If the fires enter the forest itself,
they require different tactics. “They can normally be contained by clearing
narrow fire breaks in the leaf litter and fine fuel,” Barlow says. “But this is
labour intensive over large scales, and fires need to be reached soon, before
they get too big.”
Fires that have been intentionally set, as we’re seeing in Brazil, can be even
more difficult to control compared to a sudden wildland fire. “They’re designed
to be deliberately destructive,” says Timothy Ingalsbee, co-founder and
executive director of Firefighters United for Safety, Ethics, and Ecology and
research associate at the University of Oregon. Slashing before burning
produces a lot of very dry, very flammable fuel. And at this scale, Ingalsbee
calls the fires “an act of global vandalism.”
Barlow says, “The best fire fighting technique in the Amazon is to prevent
them in the first place — by controlling deforestation and managing
agricultural activities.”
WUR’s Cathelijne Stoof agrees: “Fighting the fires is of course important now,”
she says. “For the longer term, it is way more important to focus on
deforestation.”