The Amazon rainforest, an essential piece of the planet––spanning nine South American countries––makes up half of the world’s remaining tropical forests. Sixty percent of the rainforest lies in Brazil and as the world’s largest rainforest, the Amazon plays a major role in many different processes that ensure we can live on our planet. The Amazon is crucial in regulating the world’s carbon dioxide levels, anchoring weather patterns, and fostering much of the world’s biodiversity. We need the Amazon not only because it produces a portion of the world’s oxygen, but also because it contributes to keeping the atmosphere’s carbon-dioxide levels in check. Deforestation in the rainforest is contributing to climate change and severely impacting the rainforest (and the world), as the whopping 2.5 million square miles of the Amazon rainforest is one of the world’s greatest buffers and preventers of climate change. Through the process of photosynthesis, trees and plants absorb carbon dioxide and release oxygen back into the air, which is why the Amazon is essential. The roughly 390 billion trees in the Amazon are absorbing carbon dioxide, thereby keeping it out of the atmosphere and making it into oxygen. Reports vary, but it is certain that the rainforest produces somewhere between 6 and 20 percent of all of the oxygen in Earth’s atmosphere. For this very reason, the Amazon is called the “lungs of our planet.” The Amazon is also called “a carbon sink,” as it holds up to 140 billion tons of carbon dioxide, equivalent to 14 decades’ worth of human emissions. Deforestation in this green forest already releases half a billion tons of carbon dioxide each year.
Another crucial role the Amazon rainforest plays is regulating water cycles. In a World Resources Institute report from 2018, it was found that deforestation disrupts the water cycle so severely that it can threaten agriculture halfway across the globe. The rainforest plays a big role in rain patterns, as its vegetation traps and releases moisture that travels as a cloud for thousands of miles, and without this vegetation, rainfall would be less common. These Amazon processes affect rainfall even in the United States; if the Amazon was completely cleared, Texas’s rainfall would be cut by 25%, the Sierra Nevada snowpack would be cut in half and precipitation in the US’s northwest would be reduced by up to 20%. The Amazon River even accounts for more than 15% of all freshwater that enters oceans, so the Amazon also plays a role in ocean currents. Any change in the ocean’s amount of freshwater will change the ocean’s balance of freshwater and saltwater, which can slow down or speed up the ocean currents that regulate weather across the globe. The biology of the Atlantic Ocean could also be affected in unknown ways because the Amazon River brings debris from the forest into it. The nutrients in this debris feed phytoplankton, which is the base of the ocean’s food chain, so without these nutrients coming from the forest, the whole ocean food chain could be modified.
Another massive effect of deforestation in the Amazon is the too commonly overlooked lives of the people who live there. The Amazon is home to more than 30 million people and 350 varying indigenous and ethnic groups. All the people living on this land are being put at risk and their homes are under attack. Deforestation is destroying indigenous peoples’ lands, which they depend on for survival. As their lands are being stolen and destroyed, they are being forced out of their homes. This leaves many homeless and dependent on government handouts. Additionally, according to the Brazilian government’s indigenous health service data, in 2019 alone at least 113 indigenous people were killed––most of whom were trying to protect the borders of their territories and fighting against logging and mining. Scientist Howard Waldman explains that as a result of this continuous destruction of land, “the indigenous people of the Amazon will not likely be able to remain living there in large numbers” in the future.
This beloved rainforest is also home to over 10% of the world’s biodiversity––that we know of. A new species is unearthed in the Amazon every two to three days. Additionally, the rainforest is home to many, many plants that scientists believe could become new medicines. People have even used the plants in the Amazon to produce anti-cancer drugs and quinine, the first antimalarial drug. Despite all this, the rainforest still holds much to be discovered and scientists estimate that they have studied only 0.5% of the world’s plants for medicinal potential. The Amazonian species themselves are parts of the global carbon cycle. The trees that absorb the most carbon dioxide need large birds and primates to eat their offerings and then spread the large seeds.
This clearly vital part of life is burning, and has been for the past several decades, but never at the rate we see in recent times. In 2019 alone, Brazil saw more than 74,000 fires in the Amazon, a number that nearly doubled 2018’s number of total fires. Brazilian satellites have even shown that every minute, around three football fields’ worth of trees are falling. In less than a year, Brazil has lost over 8,000 square miles of forest, a number that only continues to increase after the rate of deforestation has reached a 15-year high. In a report published by Brazil’s National Institute for Space Research (the INPE) in November of 2021, it was estimated that 8,224 square miles of the Amazon rainforest was lost between August 2020 and July 2021. This loss is an increase of 22% from the previous year and it marks the greatest area the Brazilian Amazon Rainforest has lost due to deforestation since 2006. Pará, Amazonas, Mato Grosso and Rondônia are the Brazilian states that faced the most deforestation between 2020 and 2021.
According to the World Wildlife Fund, human beings have cut down almost 20% of the Amazon over the last 50 years. At the rate it’s going, if an additional 20% of the Amazon is cleared, it could trigger a “dieback” scenario in which the forest would become a savannah and dry out completely. This would release billions of tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, fueling climate change by increasing greenhouse gasses and raising global temperatures.
Since deforestation is so clearly a threat to all life on Earth, why are these fires continuing to be lit and what is being done about it? These fires are mostly lit by people who are clearing the land for crops and grazing. The main cause of this serious deforestation in the Amazon Rainforest and other forests alike is agribusiness. Agribusiness is the system in which massive areas of forest are burned or cleared to make space for what will make revenue and provide a source of income––crops and livestock. Generally, record-breaking rates of deforestation are primarily due to infrastructure projects, logging, mining and farming––much of which aren’t even legal. Society has begun to rely on industrial agricultural products like palm, soy and industrially produced meat and dairy, which causes significant loss of forests and accelerates climate change to a point of emergency. Agricultural production is the main cause of habitat destruction and it is around 80% responsible for global deforestation. Animal agriculture is also seriously responsible for these ecological emergencies, as it is another significant driver of deforestation and is responsible for around 60% of direct global greenhouse gas emissions. Altogether, the food system––agricultural production and the consumption of it––makes up 37% of total global human-induced greenhouse gas emissions. This very system that is causing so much harm is actually expanding its terrestrial footprint to produce livestock feed in order to meet the growing demand for meat and dairy based products. This growth is only increasing the destruction of critical forests. In the 2019 UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Land Use report, they concluded that in order to protect these ecosystems we must change the global food system and instill dietary changes. Ever since 2010, waves of companies have pledged to help eliminate deforestation––many said they would do it by 2020––through responsible sourcing of products that are most viciously hurting our ecosystems: cattle, palm oil, pulp, paper and soya. These pledges have not been fulfilled. All those very products remain leading causes of deforestation. Since 2010, in Brazil, the area planted with soy hasn’t decreased, and instead has increased by 45%––a trend that is set to continue. This amount of soy farming is caused by the fact that cattle ranching (a leading cause of deforestation) requires soy farming to feed the cattle. The animals that produce meat and dairy products are fed about 90% of the soy that is farmed. The deforestation that’s a result of cattle ranching causes 340 million tons of carbon to be released into the atmosphere each year––which makes up 3.4% of global greenhouse gas emissions. Greenpeace published a three year investigation called “Slaughtering the Amazon” in 2010 and later that same year, the major meatpackers in Brazil signed the “Cattle Agreement,” in which they committed to ending deforestation, slave labor and invasions into indigenous peoples’ lands. The original investigation and the commitment following it provoked much scrutiny, and yet the Cattle Agreement was never fully implemented and cattle remains a threat to ecosystems.
Since this massive increase in deforestation, Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro signed an agreement pledging to put an end to deforestation by 2030 at the COP26 climate summit. In the past, similar commitments have not been achieved but this one is backed by the countries that account for 85% of the world’s forests (Brazil, Indonesia and the Democratic Republic of Congo) and it includes almost $19 billion of public and private funds. This said, throughout Bolsonaro’s presidency, deforestation has only increased and deforestation rates have only accelerated 88% since he took office on January 1, 2019. He has been criticized for encouraging mining and agriculture in the Amazon and for suggesting that Brazil may establish a protected reserve in the Amazon where the country will “use the riches that God gave us.” In 2019, Bolsonaro disagreed with many world leaders over how he handled the forest fires raging through the Amazon and how he had allegedly fired the former head of INPE for publicizing the massive surge in forest fires. This too has proven to be an issue in the past several years, as many groups have blamed illegal logging and criminal networks for the rise in the number of Brazil’s forest fires. Brazil’s main aim is to not try and tackle the problem that is deforestation but to start by focusing on just illegal deforestation. Since 2004, the government has been implementing their Action Plan for Prevention and Control of Deforestation in the Amazon, which is focused on reducing illegal cutting down of trees. Nevertheless, 20% of all the recorded deforestation has happened in so-called “protected areas” of the Amazon between August 2019 and July 2020. A shocking 6.9 million acres of Amazonian undesignated land have been deforested. This was reported in September 2021 by the very necessary “Simex,” the logging monitoring system that is based on satellite imagery. When looking at where the logging is concentrated, there are trends but it is hard to decipher which activities are illegal. The largest continuous area of Amazon rainforest that has been deforested is Pará, a logging heavy state, where 55% of activities are not authorized. Here the amount of forest that has been cleared is the size of Manhattan. Logging is so popular because the timber from the Amazon
is being sold at very high prices for domestic construction; development is on the rise and cities even in the Amazon have a great wood demand to build homes and industries. The reason illegal logging is happening and not being stopped is because licenses can easily be faked and recorded as legal. The question is, how can Brazilians obtain proof of legal timber production and how can the illegal be differentiated? A Brazilian non-governmental organization found in a recent report that 1.15 million acres of the Amazon have been deforested between 2019 and 2020; this is a section that is three times the size of Sao Paulo, the largest city in Brazil.
Fieldston’s Green Dean Howard Waldman shares some of his thoughts on the irreversible effects of the Amazon burning: “If the Amazon were to burn down completely, there would be absolutely no chance of our preventing the temperature of the planet rising more than 2.5 degrees Celsius. We would experience increased deaths from high temperatures, droughts in some places, and flooding in others. We would experience massive crop failures in some places. Zooming out from a completely anthropocentric view, we would lose many of the world’s species, including many sources of food, many of the sources for treatment and/or cure of diseases including cancer. Lastly, the warming and acidification of the oceans caused by the increase in carbon dioxide in the atmosphere will devastate marine life, perhaps causing the extinction of most coral ecosystems. A huge, beautiful, web of many forms of life, not just human life would be devastated.” When asked about who deforestation is disproportionately affecting, Mr. Waldman shares that while everyone around the globe is being affected, it is people who are poorer and can’t afford to adjust their lifestyle for these changes and people of color who have been discriminated against and marginalized the most and are thereby left with fewer resources, who tend to be the most hurt. The ones at fault are not solely loggers, miners and small farmers who are physically doing the burning and hacking––it is the large corporations that “buy beef from newly created pastures, mining and fossil fuel extraction corporations” and that benefit the most from the destruction of the Amazon. These corporations are mobile and ever growing and they have protection, while workers in the Amazon don’t and when their work is suspended, they lose their form of income and have to move again in search of a new livelihood. When questioned whether Brazil is doing enough to protect the Amazon, Mr. Waldman explained that while Brazil has some beneficial laws set to protect the Amazon, the “corruption, pressure from large corporations, and the leadership of President Bolsonaro” all make it so that “it seems sometimes as if the Amazon were slipping away while nobody watches.”
Now the big question we face: Is there even still hope for the Amazon? Mr. Waldman guesses that while “parts of the Amazon will be preserved” the Amazon will experience (and already has begun to experience) massive biodiversity loss. He explains that “The theory of Island Biogeography shows a strong nonlinear relationship between species number and area, so as hectares of rainforest are lost many, many species are lost.” As climate change roils the world, while the Amazon could remain a forest, it will be undoubtedly a very different one. The forest will presumably be predominantly grasslands or something even drier.
Mr. Waldman likens the situation to a commercial for oil filters in which the salesman says, “The choice is yours: you can pay me now or you can pay me later.” Everyone will eventually pay for the loss of the Amazon Rainforest. Waldman questions: “We humans are changing the inputs to the Big Ecosystem, and this planet will adjust accordingly. Will we be able to survive the outputs? Probably, but at what cost?” At this point there’s no escaping the toll of climate change. We can either pay now, by acting and cutting down on emissions and giving up our current lifestyles that causes this deforestation and global warming, or we can pay later, in the form of lives lost and habitats destroyed.
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