Besides the catastrophic effect on global warming, the depletion of the Amazon rainforest threatens Brazil's booming agribusiness and the energy supllied by its hydroelectric dams, warned the American ecologist Thomas Lovejoy, in a conference on The Amazon Rain Machine, Climate Change and Avoided Deforestation held on Thursday, June 14, at the Brazilian Center for International Relations (Cebri) in Rio.
Dr. Thomas Eugene Lovejoy III is chief biodiversity adviser to the president of the World Bank, senior adviser to the president of the United Nations Foundation, and president of the Heinz Center for Science, Economics, and the Environment. He coined the term biological diversity in 1980.
With animated maps from the US National Oceanic & Atmosphere Administration (NOAA), Dr. Lovejoy showed that the water that evapores at Amazonia makes clouds responsible for the rain in Center and Southern Brazil.
“If Brazil is interested in keeping its agribusiness in the South and its dams, it must keep the hydrologic cycle intact”, recommended the professor. “A fall of 20 per cent in rainfall would create serious problems to Southern agriculture.”
The air currents over Amazonia move the clouds towards West up to the Andean range, where part of them is diverted to the Mid West, the Southeast and the South of the country. Deforestation and El Niño caused the devastating 2005 drought in the Brazilian Amazon region.
It is important, Dr Lovejoy argued, “to maintain the integrity of the water cycle".
The Amazon rainforest depends on the moisture of the air that involves it, as it has been emphasized by Daniel Nepstad, another American scientist dedicated to research on the region. He fears that the fall in the moist may dry the small shrubs and the grass to a point where they may become fuel for potentially devastating wild fires.
An addtional risk is that climate change may foreclose reforestation. In the 1970s, when the first alerts on the depletion of the Amazon rain forest were made, Irwin and Goodland draw attention to that possbility in the book Amazon Jungle: From Green Hell to Red Desert?
Since Amazon soil is relatively recent, the fertile layer is thin and fragile. It is protected and fed by the jungle itself. After deforestation, the scorching equatorial sun might esterilize the naked earth
“Where is the tipping point” after which the Amazon rain forest degradation will be irreversible? “That’s the answer you don’t want to find out”, said the professor.
For the last ten thousand years, he added, the planet’s climate showed an “unusual stability”. This helped the development of human societies. With the Industrial Revolution, man acitivities started to interfere in climate change.
In this unstable balance that sustains life on Earth, “most of the moist is generated at the Ecuador and the seas”, noted Dr. Lovejoy. That’s why the Brazilian rain forest is pivotal for the planet’s future: “One cannot see the importance of the Amazon without looking into climate change”.
“It is time to move from partial deforestation”, advised the American scientist. “It is very hard to do. The government presence is thin in a very large area. How to create incentives to preserve the rain forest?"
The International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), with scientists from more than 100 countries, disclosed that 23 per cent of the annual increase in the concentration of carbon gases in the atmosphere is due to tropical forest depletion, particularly fires provoked to “clean” the área for pasture and agriculture. It is a pre historic practice that survives because of backwardness and underdevelopment.
In August 23, 2007, when El Niño was particularly strong, a satellite photo showed a “huge smoke cloud over South América”, remembered the ecologist.
To stop forest fires, Brazil should use both regulation and incentives, he advised. The rain forest has to be seen as a source of income and life.
“After 42 years watching local governments in the Amazon, I see a remarkable transformation. I am quite impressed. They know now that is not an inexhaustable resource. They want things that really work."
He did not seem to be optimistic about the post-Kyoto greenhouse gases emission treaty, and predicted that Southeast Ásia is going to be “the hardest hit of all by deforestation”.
To overcome the US, China and Russia resistance to harsh targets in greenhouse gases emission cuts, Dr Lovejoy proposed an energetic partnership with China. These countries alledge that emission cuts would harm their economies, reducing growth.
China will soon overtake the US as the world’s biggest polluter. It is poor in energy efficiency and has a dirty energy matrix. Today, of the ten most polluted cities in the world, at least six are Chinese.
“There needs to be a major partnership with China in energy. The US can’t do it alone”, suggested the ecologist. “China knows how sensible one of its most scarce resources, water, is sensible to climate change. They know that”.
Without the two most important economies of the world, any post-Kyoto agreement will be flawed and have very limited results.
The post-Kyoto era is also the post George W. Bush-era. “When the legacy of this administration is examined, may be that the worst thing, after the Middle East policy, will be the environment”, criticized the professor.
For Lovejoy, this is a good moment for Brazil to try to reactivate the G-7 (Group of Seven) Pilot Plan for the Protection of Brazilian Tropical Forests), a result of Rio’s 1992 Earth Summit, After all, the German Chancellor Angela Merkel is leading the negotations for a post-Kyoto treaty. She wants an emission cut of 50 per cent until 2050.
Brasil has an special interest in these negatiotions. It may get credits and investments for avoided deforestation. Of course, it has to do its homework stopping forest fires, which account for 75 per cent of Brazil’s emissions of greenhouse gases.
“There was no love at first sight between Brazil and the environment”, admitted Ambassador Marcos Azambuja while opening the debate. The environmental question was seen as an obstacle to development.
In the end, Robert Abdenur, former Brazilian Ambassador in Washington, remembered that there is a risk of a new energy crisis, if it doesn’t rain enough, and Ambassador Azambuja had the final word: “All we want is equitative treatment. Brazil has nothing to gain from deforestation”.
But Brazil’s diplomacy is still quite defensive on environmental questions. The country has the world’s largest tropical rain forest and the world’s largest biodiversity; 30 per cent of all living species live in this country.
Yet at each and every threat of ecological disaster, the spectre of Amazonia’s internationalization ressurrects, and Brazil retreats to a defensive position, when in reality it cannot be compared to the biggest polluters. It just has to stop forest fires. That would be enough to fulfil its emission reduction commitments and get some credits for avoided deforestation
In the late 1990s, at the annual conference on the Amazon at the Oxford University Center for Brazilian Studies, the American ecologist Philip Fearnside, researcher at Brazil’s National Institute for Research on the Amazon (INPA), argued that Brazil should get hundreds of billions of dollars every year for “environmental services” performed by the Amazon rain forest.
The value seems to be exaggerated, but the principle is correct. How this value is going to be calculated in a way that helps confronting global warming is a matter for the post-Kyoto accord.
“No biofuels in the Amazon”, pleaded Dr Lovejoy at the end of the meeting. “It is all part of a system. The Amazon rain machine is much more important than it has been realized so far."
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