Amazon fires: world’s lungs are burning

Like coral bleaching, Amazon fires can quickly capture the global public imagination.

Fire in the Amazon rainforest, near Abuna in Brazil’s Rondonia state. NASA research finds fires in the 2019 dry season ‘are more consistent with land clearing than with regional drought’. Picture: AFP

It was only a matter of time before the explosive tensions between Brazil’s newly elected strongman President, Jair Bolsonaro, and the world’s climate change ambitions burst into flames.

Like the Great Barrier Reef in Australia, the Amazon rainforest of South America provokes a deep sense of global ownership.

As smoke turned day to night in the Brazilian city of Sao Paulo last week celebrities and politicians took to Twitter to show their concerns for the “lungs of the Earth” and pile on to “Tropical Trump” Bolsonaro.

The burning season has arrived in the Amazon Basin and quickly become a dramatic metaphor for climate change armageddon.

The extent of the outrage, and its timing, will feed directly into next month’s climate change summit called by UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres to encourage world leaders to do more on climate change.

What is now clear is that, like coral bleaching, Amazon fires can quickly capture the global public imagination.

They can also provide an excuse to unleash demands that bubble just below the surface in global climate politics.

The push is on for trade and other sanctions, starting with Brazil, to force national leaders to lift their game in responding to the threat of climate change.

The pushback is about sovereignty, national ambition, poverty alleviation and the threat posed by a perceived new form of environmental colonialism.

‘Our house is burning’

French President Emmanuel Macron sought to lift the Amazon fires to the top of this week’s G7 leaders meeting agenda.

“Our house is burning. Literally,” he said.

Macron added: “The Amazon rainforest — the lungs which produce 20 per cent of our planet’s oxygen — is on fire.”

British Prime Minister Boris Johnson called for international action to protect the world’s rainforests. He vowed to use the G7 to call for a renewed focus on protecting nature and tackling climate change together.

Amazon fires _ Note size _ 1300x 1008

A more aggressive tone was set by Paris Mayor Anne Hidalgo, who chairs the C40 grouping of major cities acting on climate change, which includes Sydney.

Hidalgo described the Amazon rainforest as one of the most ­important common goods of ­humanity.

She said it was being burnt because of “the irresponsible behaviour of a small number of international politicians and corporate executives”.

“Fires burning in the Amazon are a crime against humanity and those responsible must be held accountable,” she said.

“Judges in jurisdictions around the world must be empowered to bring anyone found guilty of destroying the common goods of humanity to justice.

“That includes those political leaders whose inaction or neglect allows a culture of environmental degradation to flourish.

Army deployed

Bolsonaro — who has been likened to Donald Trump because he campaigns for Brazil to leave the Paris Agreement, the UN framework for climate change — has called for perspective and wants to lower the temperature of debate.

In a televised address to the nation, Bolsonaro announced plans to send the Brazilian army to help quell the fires.

The US President told Bolsonaro the US stood ready to help if needed.

Faced with threats within the EU to derail a newly negotiated trade agreement with South America, Bolsonaro said forest fires “exist in the whole world” and “cannot serve as a pretext for possible international sanctions”.

“I’ve learned as a military man to love the Amazon forest and I want to help protect it,” he said.

But after first accusing environment groups of lighting the fires, Bolsonaro said Brazil must be allowed to use its resources to build economic prosperity.

“We need to bear in mind that more than 20 million Brazilians live in that region,” he said.

“We need to give opportunity for development. It’s not only about protection.”

Bolsonaro also described the wildfires as within an “average” range for the past 15 years.

“We are in a traditionally hot and dry season, with high winds, when every year we have wildfires,” he said. “In hotter years, wildfires are more common.”

Spike, but no fire record

Bolsonaro is correct that the level of fire activity is not at record levels despite Brazil’s National Institute for Space Research recording a spike. The institute said 74,155 fires had erupted in the Amazon this year — an 84 per cent increase from the same period last year.

Pep Canadell, a CSIRO research scientist and executive director of the Global Carbon Project, said NASA had reported fire activity in the Amazon region overall was below average.

A statement from NASA said: “As of August 16, 2019, satellite observations indicated total fire activity in the Amazon Basin was slightly below average in comparison to the past 15 years.

“Though activity has been above average in (the Brazilian state) Amazonas, and to a lesser extent in Rondonia, it has been below average in Mato Grosso and Para, according to the Global Fire Emissions Database.”

Nonetheless, Canadell said the intensity of this year’s fire season was not consistent with the expected decline in fires and emissions given global efforts to reduce deforestation to halt greenhouse emissions and biodiversity loss.

“Previous administrations (in Brazil) had major achievements in reducing deforestation but it seems those gains are being lost,” Canadell said. As a global storm erupted over the Amazon fires, NASA quickly revised its analysis “to clarify our data source”.

The updated NASA posting said “as of August 16, 2019, an analysis of NASA satellite data indicated that total fire activity across the Amazon Basin this year has been close to the average in comparison to the past 15 years”.

The Amazon spreads across Brazil, Peru, Colombia, and parts of other countries.

In an update on Saturday NASA said scientists using satellites had confirmed an increase in the number and intensity of fires in the Brazilian Amazon this year, making it the most active fire year in that region since 2010.

“Fire activity in the Amazon varies considerably from year-to-year and month-to-month, driven by changes in economic conditions and climate,” said Douglas Morton, chief of the Biospheric Sciences Laboratory at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Centre.

“August 2019 stands out because it has brought a noticeable increase in large, intense, and persistent fires burning along major roads in the central Brazilian Amazon. While drought has played a large role in exacerbating fires in the past, the timing and location of fire detections early in the 2019 dry season are more consistent with land clearing than with regional drought.”

Morton said the 2019 fire activity statistics distributed by NASA and Brazil’s Instituto Nacional de Pesquisas Espaciais “are in agreement”.

‘War on environment’

Canadell said NASA’s data still showed what was happening this year was not exceptionally worse than the past two decades. But there had been a reversal in the trend to lower rates of deforestation.

Professor Bill Laurance, director of the Centre for Tropical Environmental and Sustainability Science at James Cook University, said in earlier decades Brazil was destroying an area of the Amazon rainforest nearly the size of Belgium each year.

“That cataclysmic loss has dropped since 2006 but is dramatically rebounding,” Laurance says.

“Most Amazon watchers attribute this to the recent election of Bolsonaro, the most aggressively pro-development and authoritarian leader in living memory.

“Bolsonaro is effectively declaring a ‘war on the environment’ and on indigenous peoples and their lands in his efforts to spur ­unbridled mining, logging, dam and road development in the Amazon.”

A worrying aspect of NASA’s most recent analysis was the increase in fires along major roadways. This suggests the fires are the result of clearing and confirms the longer-term environmental impact of opening up areas of forest to development.

Yale University research shows about 95 per cent of all deforestation occurs within 50km of highways or roads. It says fragment­ation from roads also leads to tree mortality and drought, which increases the potential for fire.

Unlike eucalyptus forests in Australia, Amazon rainforests are not adapted to fire and will not bounce back. Big fires can change the forest structure, making future fires more likely.

A return to clearing and fires in Brazil is a worrying sign for environment groups and adds to concerns raised in the most recent Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report on the role of land use in climate change.

The report found climate change was playing an increasing role in determining wildfire regimes, alongside human activity.

But it said there was high confidence future climate variability would enhance the risk and severity of wildfires in many biomes, such as tropical rainforests.

Associate Professor Pete Stratton from University of Tasmania says the El Nino forest fires in Asia and South America are, in a sense, natural. “It appears that the current Amazon fires are not and they will likely contribute in a detectable way to the global rise in atmospheric CO2,” he said.

Canadell said the global carbon project team was interested in the long-term human carbon budget — the carbon that is directly related to human activity and stays in the atmosphere.

“We don’t count a wildfire in a forest which will ultimately regenerate and take the carbon dioxide back, or the burning of crop residues, which will be taken back up during the next crop,” he said.

In terms of the human carbon dioxide budget, it is not relevant whether emissions from land use change come from the cleared trees rotting or being burned.

The real issue is the conversion of forest lands to pasture. Events of the past week have shown how much concern there is for the future of the Amazon jungle.

-

Clearing the air on crucial rainforest

The Amazon Basin spans more than six million sq km, most of which is covered by dense tropical forest that produces an estimated 20 per cent of the world’s oxygen.

About 60 per cent of the Amazon rainforest is in Brazil, 13 per cent is in Peru and 10 per cent in Colombia. The rest is split between Venezuela, Ecuador, Bolivia, Guyana, Suriname and French Guiana.

Almost four billion trees grow in the Amazon rainforest, which is bigger than all of the world’s other rainforests combined.

Measured by the amount of water it discharges, the Amazon River is the largest in the world.

The Amazon rainforest is the world’s richest and most varied biological reservoir, containing several million species of insects, plants, birds and other forms of life, many still unrecorded by science, according to Encyclopedia Britannica.

Major wildlife includes jaguar, manatee, tapir, red deer, capybara and many other types of rodents, and several monkey species.

Over the 20th century, the size of the Amazon has been reduced by human pressures to cut timber and create grazing pastures and farmland. In Brazil, forest cover fell from 4.1 million sq km in 1970 to 3.3 million sq km in 2016.

In the 1990s the Brazilian government began efforts to protect parts of the forest from human encroachment, exploitation, deforestation, and other forms of destruction.

International pressure saw the pace of loss of forest cover in Brazil fall sharply from about 0.4 per cent a year during the 1980s to roughly 0.1 per cent to 0.2 per cent per year from 2008. About 80 per cent of the pre-1970 forest cover remains intact.

The pace of clearing has increased since President Jair Bolsonaro took office in January vowing to make economic development a top priority.

The Amazon Environmental Research Institute says the recent increase in the number of fires in the Amazon is directly related to deliberate deforestation.

While the exact scale of deforestation will not be known until the end of the year, preliminary data suggests a significant rise.

Graham Lloyd