Leaders 7A
lthough itscradle isthesparselywoodedsavannah,hu-
mankind has long looked to forests for food, fuel, timber and
sublime inspiration. Still a livelihood for 1.5bn people, forests
maintain local and regional ecosystems and, for the other 6.2bn,
provide a—fragile and creaking—buffer against climate change.
Now droughts, wildfires and other human-induced changes are
compounding the damage from chainsaws. In the tropics, which
contain half of the world’s forest biomass, tree-cover loss has ac-
celerated by two-thirds since 2015; if it were a country, the
shrinkage would make the tropical rainforest the world’s third-
biggest carbon-dioxide emitter, after China and America.
Nowhere are the stakes higher than in the Amazon basin—
and not just because it contains 40% of Earth’s rainforests and
harbours 10-15% of the world’s terrestrial species. South Ameri-
ca’s natural wonder may be perilously close to the tipping-point
beyond which its gradual transformation into something closer
to steppe cannot be stopped or reversed, even if people lay down
their axes. Brazil’s president, Jair Bolsonaro, is hastening the
process—in the name, he claims, of development. The ecological
collapse his policies may precipitate would be felt most acutely
within his country’s borders, which encircle 80% of the basin—
but would go far beyond them, too. It must be averted.
Humans have been chipping away at the Amazon rainforest
since they settled there well over ten millennia
ago. Since the 1970s they have done so on an in-
dustrial scale. In the past 50 years Brazil has re-
linquished 17% of the forest’s original extent,
more than the area of France, to road- and dam-
building, logging, mining, soyabean farming
and cattle ranching. After a seven-year govern-
ment effort to slow the destruction, it picked up
in 2013 because of weakened enforcement and
an amnesty for past deforestation. Recession and political crisis
further pared back the government’s ability to enforce the rules.
Now Mr Bolsonaro has gleefully taken a buzz saw to them. Al-
though congress and the courts have blocked some of his efforts
to strip parts of the Amazon of their protected status, he has
made it clear that rule-breakers have nothing to fear, despite the
fact that he was elected to restore law and order. Because 70-80%
of logging in the Amazon is illegal, the destruction has soared to
record levels. Since he took office in January, trees have been dis-
appearing at a rate of over two Manhattans a week.
The Amazon is unusual in that it recycles much of its own wa-
ter. As the forest shrivels, less recycling takes place. At a certain
threshold, that causes more of the forest to wither so that, over a
matter of decades, the process feeds on itself. Climate change is
bringing the threshold closer every year as the forest heats up. Mr
Bolsonaro is pushing it towards the edge. Pessimists fear that the
cycle of runaway degradation may kick in when another 3-8% of
the forest vanishes—which, under Mr Bolsonaro, could happen
soon. There are hints the pessimists may be correct (see Brief-
ing). In the past 15 years the Amazon has suffered three severe
droughts. Fires are on the rise.
Brazil’s president dismisses such findings, as he does science
more broadly. He accuses outsiders of hypocrisy—did rich coun-
triesnotfelltheirownforests?—and,sometimes, of using envi-
ronmental dogma as a pretext to keep Brazil poor. “The Amazon
is ours,” the president thundered recently. What happens in the
Brazilian Amazon, he thinks, is Brazil’s business.
Except it isn’t. A “dieback” would directly hurt the seven other
countries with which Brazil shares the river basin. It would re-
duce the moisture channelled along the Andes as far south as
Buenos Aires. If Brazil were damming a real river, not choking off
an aerial one, downstream nations could consider it an act of
war. As the vast Amazonian store of carbon burned and rotted,
the world could heat up by as much as 0.1°C by 2100—not a lot,
you may think, but the preferred target of the Paris climate agree-
ment allows further warming of only 0.5°C or so.
Mr Bolsonaro’s other arguments are also flawed. Yes, the rich
world has razed its forests. Brazil should not copy its mistakes,
but learn from them instead as, say, France has, by reforesting
while it still can. Paranoia about Western scheming is just that.
The knowledge economy values the genetic information seques-
tered in the forest more highly than land or dead trees. Even if it
did not, deforestation is not a necessary price of development.
Brazil’s output of soyabeans and beef rose between 2004 and
2012, when forest-clearing slowed by 80%. In fact, aside from the
Amazon itself, Brazilian agriculture may be deforestation’s big-
gest victim. The drought of 2015 caused maize
farmers in the central Brazilian state of Mato
Grosso to lose a third of their harvest.
For all these reasons, the world ought to
make clear to Mr Bolsonaro that it will not toler-
ate his vandalism. Food companies, pressed by
consumers, should spurn soyabeans and beef
produced on illegally logged Amazonian land,
as they did in the mid-2000s. Brazil’s trading
partners should make deals contingent on its good behaviour.
The agreement reached in June by the eu and Mercosur, a South
American trading bloc of which Brazil is the biggest member, al-
ready includes provisions to protect the rainforest. It is over-
whelmingly in the parties’ interest to enforce them. So too for
China, which is anxious about global warming and needs Brazil-
ian agriculture to feed its livestock. Rich signatories of the Paris
agreement, who pledged to pay developing ones to plant carbon-
consuming trees, ought to do so. Deforestation accounts for 8%
of global greenhouse-gas emissions but attracts only 3% of the
aid earmarked for combating climate change.The wood and the trees
If there is a green shoot in Mr Bolsonaro’s scorched-earth tactics
towards the rainforest, it is that they have made the Amazon’s
plight harder to ignore—and not just for outsiders. Brazil’s agri-
culture minister urged Mr Bolsonaro to stay in the Paris agree-
ment. Unchecked deforestation could end up hurting Brazilian
farmers if it leads to foreign boycotts of Brazilian farm goods. Or-
dinary Brazilians should press their president to reverse course.
They have been blessed with a unique planetary patrimony,
whose value is intrinsic and life-sustaining as much as it is com-
mercial. Letting it perish would be a needless catastrophe. 7Deathwatch
Brazil has the power to save Earth’s greatest rainforest—or destroy itLeaders