The EconomistAugust 3rd 2019 BriefingThe Amazon 152
1ing the environment ministry—mostly be-
cause deals with disapproving European
firms would be at risk. A bill introduced by
Flávio Bolsonaro, the president’s eldest son
and a senator in his own right, to eliminate
a requirement for farmers to preserve some
natural vegetation on land they clear has
not yet passed. The supreme court blocked
a decree to transfer powers over the demar-
cation of indigenous reserves from the jus-
tice ministry to Ms Cristina’s—which
would have “put the fox in charge of the
chicken coop,” argues Randolfe Rodrigues,
an opposition senator.
But even without the biggest changes,
Mr Bolsonaro’s government can still en-
courage, directly or indirectly, a large
amount of deforestation, by not enforcing
the laws that prohibit it. On February 28th
the environment minister, Ricardo Salles,
fired 21 of Ibama’s 27 state heads, following
the president’s orders to “clean out” the
agency. Most have yet to be replaced, in-
cluding all but one in the Amazon states.
The environment ministry has started to
flag up in advance where and when anti-
logging operations will take place. Between
January and May, Ibama imposed the low-
est number of fines for illegal deforesta-
tion in a decade.
Mr Salles says that “the role of the state
is to protect landowners’ property rights”.
He wants to use donations from Norway
and Germany to the 3.6bn reais ($950m)
Amazon Fund to compensate landowners
for land that had been turned into conser-
vation areas, even though most of it was oc-
cupied illegally.
Deforesters appear emboldened. Ac-
cording to the Indigenist Missionary Coun-
cil, a Catholic group, the number of illegal
invasions in indigenous areas has jumped.
On July 24th miners with guns invaded a
village in the northern state of Amapá,
killed one of its leaders and expelled the
residents. Satellite data show a drastic rise
in the year-on-year deforestation rate
starting in May, the beginning of the dry
season. In July, more than 1,800km^2 was
cleared, three times more than last year.
These statistics tell only part of the
story. The Amazon matters to the global cli-
mate because it is a sink of carbon, mitigat-
ing warming. If the rainforest were to die
back, the large amount of greenhouse gas-
es this would release would speed up that
process. But the climate matters to the Am-
azon, too. It is sensitive to changes in tem-
perature and rainfall, as well as to atmo-
spheric carbon-dioxide levels.
The Amazon is unique among tropical
rainforests in that it produces a lot of its
own rainfall. As moisture travels from the
Atlantic to Peru, the Amazon’s trees recycle
some of it; around half the forest’s rain is
reused this way. Rainwater is pulled up
from the roots to the canopy, where it is re-
leased back to the atmosphere to fall as rainagain. Not only does this provide moisture
to the region, the evaporation off the leaves
also has a local cooling effect.
This is what has led to worries about tip-
ping-points. In an influential paper in 2007
Gilvan Sampaio and Carlos Nobre of Bra-
zil’s National Institute for Space Research
forecast that, were 40% of the forest to per-
ish, the loss of water-recycling capacity
would mean very little of the rest would
have enough rainfall to survive.Trees rudely hollowed
Alongside the threat from deforestation,
the forest’s capacity to water itself can be
weakened by rising temperatures. Beatriz
Marimon and Ben Hur Marimon, at the
University of Mato Grosso in Nova Xavan-
tina, have kept tabs for decades on dozens
of plots in the transição, the margin be-
tween the wet Amazon and the drier cer-
rado. Today, Mr Marimon says, they are see-
ing “two warmings in one”. On top of global
warming are changes that result from de-
forestation, which removes the air-condi-tioning effect provided by water evaporat-
ing from the trees’ leaves.
A study by Divino Silvério and col-
leagues at the Amazon Environmental Re-
search Institute, published in 2015, found
that converting forest to pasture increased
land temperatures by 4.3°C; if pasture was
then turned over to arable crops, things
warmed a little more. The transiçãois al-
ready hotter and drier than most of the
rainforest. Clearing more of its patchwork
of forest, farms and savannah makes the
remaining woodland even hotter.
Ms Marimon has also observed that
temperatures above 40°C dry out trees,
making them more likely to fall in strong
winds. The fragmentation brought about
by farming creates isolated patches of for-
est. If they lose access to seed banks in the
soil and water sources, such disconnected
fragments are less able to recover.
How plants respond to carbon-dioxide
levels probably exacerbates matters. The
more carbon dioxide in the air, the less air
plants need to process in order to photo-
synthesise. The less air they take in, the
less water vapour they let out. As a conse-
quence, the plants both do less to cool their
immediate environment (because less wa-
ter evaporates) and also make the atmo-
sphere less moist. This has been shown to
be happening in other watersheds, though
there is not yet conclusive evidence from
the Amazon.
Clearances also lead to local drying. Sat-
ellite data show that air which passes over
primary rainforest produces twice as much
rain a few days later than that which passes
over farmland. In 2012 scientists at the Uni-
versity of Leeds predicted that continued
deforestation would cause rainfall in the
Amazon to drop by 12% in the wet season
and by 21% in the dry season by 2050.VENEZUELACOLOMBIAECUADORGUYANA
SURI-
NAMEFrenchGuiana
(toFrance)BOLIVIABRAZIL
PERU
Mato
GrossoAmazonas
MaranhãoRondôniaRoraima AmapáTocantinsPa ráAcreAmazon
drainage
basinCerradoAmazon
riverPACI F I C
OCEANATL A NTI C
OCEAN*Treecovermeasured in 2016/
Source: INPE, PRODES/TerraBrasilisTapajós- Santarém
Arapiuns
Extractive
ReserveTapajós
National
ForestNova
Xavantina BrasíliaAreas of
deforestation
1988-Brazilian
Amazon*500 kmThe root of the problemSource:INPE,PRODES/TerraBrasilis *EstimateBrazilian Amazon, annual deforestation
km², ’11988 95 2000 05 10 15 18*051015201,000km² =140,000 football 25
pitches30