The world’s approach to the Amazon rainforest must be transformed to avoid an irreversible, catastrophic tipping point, according to the most comprehensive study of the region ever carried out.
More than 200 scientists collaborated on the new report, which finds that more than a third of the world’s biggest tropical forest is degraded or deforested, rainfall is declining and dry seasons are growing longer.
In recognition of the critical situation, the authors have formed a new Science Panel for the Amazon (SPA), which released its first report on the final scheduled day of Cop26 in Glasgow. The group aims to serve a similar synthesising function for research on the Amazon rainforest as the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) does for studies on the climate.
One of the founders, Jos Barlow of Lancaster University, said the urgency of the Amazon crisis necessitated a change of outlook. “At the start of the century, large-scale forest dieback was seen as a remote possibility, predicted by oversensitive models. However, there is now irrefutable evidence that parts of the Amazon have reached a tipping point, with megafires, increased temperatures, reductions in rainfall. The severe social and ecological changes mean that a rethink is urgently needed. We cannot continue business as usual. The report is a first step in encouraging that rethink.”
What jumps out among the many hundreds of pages in the initial study is the extraordinary capacity of the Amazon to support life in and beyond the borders of the rainforest. It says new species in the region are being discovered every other day. The diversity of plants, insects and animals confers stability and resilience to local ecosystems, plays a critical role in global water cycles and regulates climate variability. The basin produces the largest river discharge on Earth, accounting for 16% to 22% of the world’s river input to the oceans.
Other chapters describe how these globally important functions are weakening as a result of land conversion for cattle ranches and soy plantations, and disruptions of river systems by dams and hydroelectric dams. About 17% of the Amazon has been cleared and more than 17% degraded.
The authors say tipping points may already have been passed in some areas, such as the south-east Amazon and on the border between northern Brazilian states Maranhão and Pará, where more than 70% of the rainforest has gone and once-abundant species are endangered.
The report says this problem is likely to widen unless the current destructive model of development, which only benefits a small minority, is replaced by a more holistic and inclusive approach. “If the Amazon is to survive, we must show how it can be transformed to generate economic and environmental benefits that would be the result of collaborations between scientists, Indigenous knowledge holders and their leaders, local communities, private sector and governments,” said Carlos Nobre, a Brazilian Earth System scientist and one of the co-chairs of the SPA.
More direct forms of human destruction are emerging so quickly that there has not been time to include them all in this study. In the past week, forest has been cleared in Ecuador’s Yasuni national park for an oil road and pipelines. In the Volta Grande stretch of the Xingu River in Brazil, the Canadian mining company Belo Sun is closing in on a deal for an open cast pit that would scar the Amazon landscape and could contaminate water supplies that have already been disrupted by the nearby Belo Monte hydroelectric dam.
Brazil, Ecuador and Canada were among the signatories to a Cop26 declaration last week that promised to halt deforestation by 2030. Conservationists are sceptical, especially in Brazil where protections have weakened and deforestation rates have surged under the president, Jair Bolsonaro, to their highest levels in a decade.
Regardless of who is in power, the SPA participants say it is essential for scientists to examine what is happening on the ground and share the evidence with anyone willing to listen. “We must keep pushing, mobilising and informing people as much as possible,” said Marina Hirota of the Federal University of Santa Catarina in Florianópolis, Brazil.
The scientists are collaborating with a wider group of actors than the IPCC, including Indigenous leaders, in the search for solutions. One of the lead authors, Erika Berenguer, of the University of Oxford, was optimistic this could bring positive change. “This is a message of hope,” she said. “I don’t want to sound naive given what we have seen over the past three years, but this report gives clear pathways for a different future. We don’t need a forest based on destruction; we can have a future with a healthy ecosystem where people are thriving. This comes from scientists who are a cynical and sceptical bunch. We deal with evidence and we see evidence that the future can be different.”
Countries outside South America also need to be part of the solution instead of the problem, the authors and Indigenous activists say.
Juma Xipaya, an Indigenous activist from the Xipaya people, who live in the Volta Grande near Altamira in Brazil, said citizens of wealthy nations needed to ask whether they were implicated in the ecocide of the Amazon through investments or trade with polluting companies.
Speaking at an event in Glasgow this week, she said that although Cop26 had committed more than a billion dollars to Indigenous communities, the solutions to the crisis in the Amazon needed more than money. “We don’t just need funds, we need your respect, your commitments, because providing financial resources does not exempt you from your responsibilities to the climate and to the Earth,” she said.
