MARÍA FLUXÁ
@mariafluxa
Rio de Janeiro
MAITE VAQUERO (INFOGRAPHY)
Monday, December 9, 2019 - 02:54
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- Amazon. What is behind the fires that could alter the global climate
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In the Brazilian Amazon jungle there are trees that walk - the pashi uba -; others, covered by tavivas , ants that make you invisible. The acai that they enjoy on Ipanema beach grows high, and Brazil's great and threatened chestnut tree has a majestic trunk. There is a tree that anesthetizes and another that helps heal the battered lungs. The pink pau smells like Chanel No. 5 although, in reality, it is the perfume that Marilyn Monroe slept with that contains her fragrance, now imitated in a laboratory. Hemorrhages are cut with the leaves of inaja , and the rubber is extracted from the serengeira .
The world's largest rainforest, home to three million species that provides 20% of the planet's oxygen, is today more threatened than a decade ago. This is clear from the latest official data, recently disclosed by the National Institute for Space Research (INPE, in its acronym in Portuguese) through its network of Prodes satellites.
Between August 2018 and July 2019, an area of 9,762 square kilometers, similar to 1.4 million football fields, has been deforested, representing an increase of 29.5% over the previous period and the highest rate since 2008 .
The numbers have confirmed the alarms unleashed in summer, when the fires in the Amazon caught attention and unleashed criticism from the international community. Although the Army had to be deployed to contain them, the official response included from the initial passivity for blaming it to the dry season to insinuations that NGOs could have initiated them.
However, scientists and organizations such as Greenpeace argue that the increase in deforestation coincides with the arrival of President Jair Bolsonaro, who denies the existence of anthropogenic climate change and chose a foreign minister for whom global warming is a " Marxist invention. " "It is not going to end with deforestation, or with fires. They are cultural," the Brazilian president said after learning about the increase in deforestation.
"The change in trend since January coincides consistently with the Administration of President Jair Bolsonaro, under which deforestation has exploded," explains US scientist Philip Fearnside, a researcher at the National Institute of Fisheries of Amazonia (INPA), based in Manaus, where he has been living for four decades.
Thus, the "change of discourse", and "concrete actions, such as the dismantling of environmental agencies, reduction of fines" would explain the increase in fires and deforestation in the Amazon. "That message that it is okay to violate environmental laws has been transmitted very clearly to people," warns this scientist who, like Greenpeace, warns that the worst is yet to come as deforestation data has only increased.
Ground uses
For the current Brazilian Government, deforestation may be a cultural phenomenon but researchers like Fearnside point out other more prosaic causes so that " a large part of the Amazon is being erased from the map ." Thus, among them would be the cutting down of trees for commercial exploitation (legal and illegal), the raising of cattle, the construction of roads and their consequences, because "they launch social processes that escape government control ... this one it makes the roads that allows thousands of people to expand through the jungle, "he explains. And it is that by facilitating access "increases the profitability of agriculture and livestock, as well as the value of the land with the consequent speculative deforestation ." In addition, we must add monocultures such as soybeans - second export of Brazil after meat - and now sugarcane.
At the beginning of the month, President Bolsonaro signed an administrative decree that abolished the environmental zoning of sugarcane, which until then prevented the advance of this crop, used largely to produce ethanol, in the Amazon rainforest and the wetlands of the Marshland. This, Fearnside explains, will generate an unprecedented impact, with more deforestation and carbon emissions that will be added to climate change. Also, last week, the president announced that he could free the export of native trees from the Amazon - such as those who heal, those who walk, those who become invisible ... - now prohibited by law.
The consequences are dire for the planet, but especially for Brazil. " Losing the jungle includes losing biodiversity , contributing to global warming, and has a great impact on water recycling," Fearnside continues. "The Amazon puts the water back into the atmosphere, which is vital to ensure the rains, not only in the jungle, but in big cities like Sao Paulo, whose water supplies are already at the limit." And that impact extends from Argentina to the American Midwest.
In fact, this scientist, awarded the Nobel Peace Prize as a member of the Intergovernmental Group on Climate Change, warns, as "much of the Amazon has been affected by the cutting down of trees, that makes it more vulnerable so with the climate change more fires are expected. " The fires that occurred in the wake of El Niño Godzilla, in 2015, were a wake-up call about what could happen in the Amazon. "There has been more damage this year than then," he says.
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