Dying Forest: One year to save the Amazon
Published: 23 July 2006
Deep in the heart of the world’s greatest rainforest, nine days’ journey by
boat from the sea, Otavio Luz Castello is anxiously watching the soft
waters of the Amazon drain away. Every day they recede further, like water
running slowly out of an unimaginably immense bath, threatening a global
catastrophe. He pointed out what was happening on Wednesday, standing on an island in a
quiet channel of the giant river. Just a month ago, he explained, it had
been entirely under water. Now it was jutting a full 15 feet above it.
It is a sign that severe drought is returning to the Amazon for a second
successive year. And that would be ominous indeed. For, as we report on
page 12 today, new research suggests that just one further dry year beyond
that could tip the whole vast forest into a cycle of destruction.
Just the day before, top scientists had been delivering much the same
message at a remarkable floating symposium on the Rio Negro, on whose
strange black waters this capital city of the Amazon stands. They told the
meeting – convened on a flotilla of boats by Ecumenical Patriarch
Bartholomew of the Greek Orthodox Church, dubbed the “green Pope” for his
environmental activism – that global warming and deforestation were rapidly
pushing the entire enormous area towards a “tipping point”, where it would
irreversibly start to die.
The consequences would be truly awesome. The wet Amazon, the planet’s
greatest celebration of life, would turn to dry savannah at best, desert at
worst. This would cause much of the world – including Europe – to become
hotter and drier, making this sweltering summer a mild foretaste of what is
to come. In the longer term, it could make global warming spiral out of
control, eventually making the world uninhabitable.
Nowhere could seem further from the world’s problems than the idyllic spot
where Otavio Luz Castello lives. The young naturalist’s home is a chain of
floating thatched cottages that make up a research station in the Mamiraua
Reserve, halfway between here and Brazil’s border with Colombia.
Rare pink river dolphin play in the tranquil waters surrounding the
cottages, kingfishers dive into them, giant, bright butterflies zig-zag
across them and squirrel monkeys romp in the trees on their banks. And an
18ft black caiman answers, literally, to the name of Fred; gliding up to
dine abstemiously on sliced white bread when called. There is little to
suggest that it may be witnessing the first scenes of an apocalypse. The
waters of the rivers of the Amazon Basin routinely fall by some 30-40 feet-
greater than most of the tides of the world’s seas – between the wet and
dry seasons. But last year they just went on falling in the worst drought
in recorded history.
In the Mamiraua Reserve they dropped 51 feet, 15 feet below the usual low
level and other areas were more badly affected. At one point in the western
Brazilian state of Acre, the world’s biggest river shrank so far that it
was possible to walk across it. Millions of fish died; thousands of
communities, whose only transport was by water, were stranded. And the
drying forest caught fire; at one point in September, satellite images
spotted 73,000 separate blazes in the basin.
This year, says Otavio Luz Castello, the water is draining away even faster
than the last one – and there are still more than three months of the dry
season to go. He adds: “I am very concerned.”
It is much the same all over Amazonia. In the Jau National Park, 18 hours
by boat up the Rio Negro from here, local people who took me out by canoe
at dawn found it impossible to get to places they had reached without
trouble just the evening before. Acre, extraordinarily, received no rain
for 40 days recently, and sandbanks are already beginning to surface in its
rivers. Flying over the forest – with trees in a thousand shades of green
stretching, for hour after hour, as far as the eye can see – it seems
inconceivable that anything could endanger its verdant immensity. Until
recently, scientists took the same view, seeing it as one of the world’s
most stable environments.
Though they condemned the way that, on average, an area roughly the size of
Wales is cut down each year, this did not seem to endanger the forest as a
whole, much less the entire planet. Now they are changing their minds in
the face of increasing evidence that the deforestation is pushing both the
Amazon and the world to the brink of disaster.
Dr Antonio Nobre, of Brazil’s National Institute of Amazonian Research,
told the floating symposium – whose delegates ranged from politicians and
environmentalists, to Amazonian Indian shamans and Roman Catholic cardinals
- of unpublished research which suggests that the felling is both drying up
the entire forest and helping to cause the hurricanes that have been
battering the United States and the Caribbean.
The hot, wet Amazon, he explained, normally evaporates vast amounts of
water, which rise high into the air as if in an invisible chimney. This
draws in the wet north-East trade winds, which have picked up moisture from
the Atlantic. This in turn controls the temperature of the ocean; as the
trade winds pick up the moisture, the warm water that is left gets saltier
and sinks.
Deforestation disrupts the cycle by weakening the Amazonian evaporation
which drives the whole process. One result is that the hot water in the
Atlantic stays on the surface and fuels the hurricanes. Another is that
less moisture arrives on the trade winds, intensifying drought in the
forest. “We believe there is a vicious cycle” says Dr Nobre.
Marina Silva, a fiery former rubber-tapper who is now Brazil’s environment
minister, described how the Government was finally cracking down on the
felling by seizing illegally cut logs, closing down illicit enterprises and
fining and imprisoning offenders. As a result, she says, it dropped by 31
per cent last year.
But even so, it has only returned to the levels it was in 2001, still
double what it was 10 years before. And it has reached far into the forest
after the American multinational Cargill built a huge port for soya three
years ago at Santarem, some 400 miles downriver from here.
This encouraged entrepreneurs to cut down the trees to grow the soya.
The symposium flew down en masse to inspect the damage this had caused -
vast fields of beans destined to feed supermarket chickens in Europe, where
until recently there had been lush, trackless forest.
Priests and community leaders who were campaigning to protect the forest
told us how they had received repeated death threats.
So far about a fifth of the Amazonian rainforest has been razed completely.
Another 22 per cent has been harmed by logging, allowing the sun to
penetrate to the forest floor drying it out. And if you add these two
figures together, the total is growing perilously close to 50 per cent,
which computer models predict as the “tipping point” that marks the death
of the Amazon.
The models did not expect this to happen until 2050. But, says Dr Nobre,
“what was predicted for 2050, may have begun to happen in 2005.” Nobody
knows when the crucial threshold will be passed, but growing numbers of
scientists believe that it is coming ever closer.
One of Dr Nobre’s colleagues, Dr Philip Fearnside, puts it this way: “With
every tree that falls we increase the probability that the tipping point
will arrive.”
Brazilian politicians say that the country has so many other pressing
problems that the destruction is unlikely to be brought under control,
unless the world helps to pay for the survival of the forest on which it
too depends. Calculations by Hylton Philipson, a British merchant banker
and rainforest campaigner, reckon that it will take $60bn (£32bn) a year,
less than a third of the cost of the Iraq war.
The scientists insist there is no time for delay. “If we do not act now”,
says Dr Fearnside, “we will lose the Amazon forest that helps sustain
living conditions throughout the world.”