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there are few humans with more power over the climate than Jair Bolsonaro. The Trump-like president of Brazil knows this better than anyone—which is why he’s threatening to destroy it unless he gets lots of cash.
Reports of this threat come from President Joe Biden’s virtual summit of world climate leaders held this past Earth Day. At that summit, Bolsonaro publicly pledged to make Brazil carbon neutral by 2050 and end illegal deforestation of the Amazon rainforest by 2030. That was great news, because ending deforestation in the Amazon is crucial to reaching the 1.5 degree Celsius target. It simply will not happen without Brazil.
Privately, however, Bolsonaro refused to make any agreement with the Biden administration to end his own legal assault on the Amazon. And his environment minister, Ricardo Salles, told the Wall Street Journal that it wouldn’t happen unless the U.S. gave Brazil at least $1 billion. “We think that $1 billion … is a very reasonable amount that can be mobilized up front,” he said.
Salles told the Journalthat Brazil needs the money because it can’t save the rainforest without it. The country, he said, needs help to increase enforcement of environmental laws against illegal deforesters, and to support new programs to “provide alternatives to poor farmers who slash and burn to raise crops and cattle.”
But that’s very hard to believe, given the Bolsonaro administration’s record of implementing policies that actively weaken environmental enforcement and encourage slash and burning in the Amazon. The recent alarming acceleration in Amazon deforestation is a “direct result” of Bolsonaro’s policies, according to Amnesty International. Also, literally the day after the interview, Bolsonaro approved a 24 percent cut to Brazil’s environment budget.
“Deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon is not the result of a lack of money, but a consequence of the government’s deliberate failure of care,” former Brazilian environment ministers Marina Silva and Rubens Ricupero wrote in The Guardian. Marcio Astrini, the executive secretary of the Brazilian Climate Observatory, seems to agree. “It’s extortion,” he told Rolling Stone’s Jeff Goodell in a recent interview. “Bolsonaro and his team are saying, ‘If you don’t give us the money, we don’t know what will happen to the Amazon.’
Silva and Ricupero warned the Biden administration not to fall for Bolsonaro’s trap. “What the government is missing is not cash, but a commitment to the truth,” they wrote. “To reach a billion-dollar agreement with Bolsonaro’s government at this crucial moment will only strengthen its resolve: it will be a boon for the farmers and land-grabbers who have illegally occupied public forests and indigenous land and send the precisely opposite message to that which is needed in this crucial year for the climate.”
So what should Biden do instead? Some suggest a regional environmental treaty, though Bolsonaro hasn’t been known to take those very seriously. Others, like Senate Democrats, have urged Biden to only give aid with very strict conditions. There’s also the option of a more aggressive approach—denial of aid, sanctions, et cetera, et cetera.
The most immediate thing Biden has to do, though, is appoint a new U.S. ambassador to Brazil. Because up until last week, the Bolsonaro-friendly ambassador appointed by Trump remained in place. Todd Chapman, the now-former ambassador to Brazil, had “made headlines by cozying up to Bolsonaro’s administration, particularly by hosting the president at a July 4 barbecue at his residence in the midst of the pandemic,” the Federal News Network reported. His resignation last week “could signal more U.S. pressure on Brazil regarding environmental issues,” it added.
This is a story that will continue to unfold. Until then, I recommend reading the Rolling Stonefeature about Bolsonaro’s climate sabotage published last week, which deems him “the most dangerous climate denier in the world.” It’s a succinct and well-reported summary of the threat Bolsonaro poses to everyone’s future, and why that threat is coming to an alarming head right now as a dry season exacerbated by fossil fuels approaches.
I also recommend reading about how deforestation in the Amazon has been accelerating lately, and how a climate-fueled dry season is making the problem worse. You don’t have to go anywhere to do that; I’m re-posting an article about it from Mongabay below.
One more thing: We talk about the U.S. a lot at the newsletter. But Brazil’s role in our collective climate future cannot be overstated. The country is home to more than half of the Amazon, which covers 4 percent of the Earth’s surface and is home to one in ten of Earth’s species. The carbon-absorbing trees in that forest are a big reason fossil fuels haven’t already turned the planet into an unlivable hotbox. Without them, we’re fucked.
I know that all seems very depressing. But if we don’t know about it, we don’t care. And if we don’t care, nothing gets done.
https://www.alternet.org/2021/03/amazon/
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'We're destroying our life-support systems': Study suggests the Amazon now ?contributes to warming
Jessica Corbett and Common Dreams March 14, 2021
While recent research has raised alarm that tropical forests including the Amazon could soon stop serving as carbon sinks, a first-of-its-kind study from 30 experts that takes into account other greenhouse gases suggests the world's largest rainforest may already be contributing to the warming of the planet.
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The new analysis, published Thursday in the journal Frontiers in Forests and Global Change, considers not only carbon dioxide (CO2) and its impact on the global climate but also that of methane (CH4), nitrous oxide (N20), black carbon, biogenic volatile organic compounds (BVOCs), aerosols, evapotranspiration, and albedo.
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"What the authors do that's important is to expand the conversation beyond carbon dioxide, which is what 90% of public conversation is centered around," Patrick Megonigal, associate director of research at the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center, told National Geographic.
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"CO2 is not a lone actor," added Megonigal, who was cited in but not involved with the research, which was funded by the National Geographic Society. "When you consider the whole cast of other characters, the outlook in the Amazon is that the impacts of human activities will be worse than we realize."
As 15-year-old climate activist Alexandria Villaseñor put it in a tweet about the study: "We're destroying our life-support systems. We're running out of time."
The study notes that "after a transient period of reduced deforestation and increased optimism, rising agricultural conversion and illegal logging activities are again accelerating Amazonian forest loss. This resurgence has renewed concerns that the region is rapidly approaching a catastrophic 'tipping point.'"
Data from the Rainforest Foundation Norway revealed Monday that human activities have destroyed 34% of old-growth tropical rainforests and degraded 30% worldwide. Over half of that destruction since 2002 has been in the Amazon and neighboring South American rainforests. Under Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro—whose country is home to the majority of the Amazon—deforestation hit a 12-year high in 2020.
"Cutting the forest is interfering with its carbon uptake; that's a problem," Kristofer Covey, lead author of the new study and a professor of environmental studies at Skidmore College, told National Geographic. "But when you start to look at these other factors alongside CO2, it gets really hard to see how the net effect isn't that the Amazon as a whole is really warming global climate."
The study says that despite some uncertainty, "we conclude that current warming from non-CO2 agents (especially CH4 and N2O) in the Amazon Basin largely offsets—and most likely exceeds—the climate service provided by atmospheric CO2 uptake. We also find that the majority of anthropogenic impacts act to increase the radiative forcing potential of the basin."
"Given the large contribution of less-recognized agents," the paper continues—noting that Amazonian trees alone emit about 3.5% of all global CH4—focusing strictly on carbon uptake and storage "is incompatible with genuine efforts to understand and manage the biogeochemistry of climate in a rapidly changing Amazon Basin."
Covey and his colleagues told National Geographic that reversing the damage that's already been done will require halting emissions from fossil fuels around the world and reining in Amazon deforestation, "along with reducing dam building and increasing efforts to replant trees."
The Amazon is among the most biodiverse places on the planet. The ongoing coronavirus pandemic has highlighted the importance of conserving and restoring rainforests not only because of the climate emergency but also to prevent future zoonotic disease outbreaks.
As the pandemic—officially declared a year ago Thursday—has killed more than 2.6 million people and sickened over 119 million worldwide, experts from across the globe have repeatedly called on humanity to heal its "broken relationship with nature."
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brazil’s National Center for the Prevention of Forest Fires reports over 7 million acres of the world’s largest wetland have burned in unprecedented fires exacerbated by the climate crisis. The Pantanal fires have consumed 50% more land this year than have burned along the West Coast of the United States.
In California, the Creek Fire has become the largest single-source fire in state history, burning nearly 300,000 acres in Fresno and Madera counties. Five of California’s six largest fires in recorded history are still raging, including the record-shattering August Complex fire, which is now at 860,000 acres with 40% containment.
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https://www.ecowatch.com/indigenous-women-protect-amazon-2647376402.html
by Rosamaria Loures and Sarah Sax
On an early December morning last year in the state of Maranhão, Brazil, half a dozen members of the Indigenous Guajajara people packed their bags with food, maps and drone equipment to get ready for a patrol. They said goodbye to their children, uncertain when, or whether, they would see them again. Then, they hoisted their bags over their shoulders and set out to patrol a section of the 173,000 hectares (428,000 acres) of the primary rainforest they call home.
This is the Caru Indigenous Territory, where the Amazon peters out toward the northeastern coast of Brazil, and it contains some of the last stretches of intact, contiguous forest in Maranhão. It is also under increasing threat: this part of Brazil has been ravaged by some of the country's highest rates of deforestation and land conflicts over the past decade. Patrols led by Indigenous groups like theirs, known often by the moniker of "Forest Guardians," have been instrumental in enforcing protections and preventing loggers from entering Indigenous territories. Patrols and their enforcement tactics, which have been ramping up over the past decade, have also resulted in community members being threatened, attacked, and killed — as in the case of Paulo Paulino Guajajara last year, who was murdered in a neighboring Indigenous territory.
But members of the patrol that set out through the forest last December don't call themselves guardians; they prefer warriors. And they differ in one other notable aspect: they are all women.
"Why did we take the initiative? Because we are mothers. If we don't act, there would be no forest standing," said Paula Guajajara, one of the "women warriors of the forest," in a public event last year.
Called guerreiras da floresta in Portuguese, this is the name these women have given themselves. They are in many ways an embodiment of what policymakers, politicians and scholars around the world say is a necessary shift toward gender equality in environmental movements. And they are contributing not just womanpower to the patrols — they are also helping to diversify the tactics and forge new partnerships.
In Brazil in particular, where protecting intact forests is one of the cheapest, easiest and most effective solutions forcombating climate change, the work they are doing is literally saving the world.[vid]
Creating a Space and Finding Their Voice
Actively patrolling their land for invaders is nothing new to the Guajajara; Indigenous people have more than 500 years of experience in this. Today, they use satellite technology and coordinate efforts with outside law enforcement to achieve their goals. This approach is relatively new, but its use has been on the rise in recent years.
"Across the country more of these groups are forming because of government inaction — or worse, because the government is actively trying to exploit their lands," Sarah Shenker, campaign coordinator for Survival International's Uncontacted Tribes team, said in an interview. These groups are primarily men, although women are sometimes included in the patrols. But according to Shenker, as well as other experts interviewed for this article, to have "forest guardian" groups made up solely of women is unique.
The women warriors were formed six years ago, an offshoot of a program developed by Indigenous organizations and the Brazilian government and implemented by the Ministry of the Environment to enhance the territorial and cultural protection of Indigenous people, called Projeto Demonstrativo de Povos Indígenas (PDPI) in Portuguese. At the time, the predominantly male forest guardians were attempting to end illegal logging and the sale of wood from their territory — a task that was proving extremely difficult. Seeing this, the women stepped in and formed their own group consisting originally of 32 women.
"In order not to let the project end, we, the Guajajara women, entered and took over the project," Cícera Guajajara da Silva, one of the women warriors, said in an interview.
But the path to being taken seriously and treated as equals has been long.
"To seek partnership, we walked, talked, slept on the floor — all in order to seek improvement for our community," Paula Guajajara said, recalling the initial difficulty in being heard and taken seriously inside and outside of the communities. Their patience has paid off, and the women are quick to point out the support and close collaboration of the male forest guardians that has allowed them to combat the greater goal of stopping illegal logging. "Today we have the women warriors who work together with the forest guardians," Paula Guajajara said. "We've already evicted a lot of loggers. If we hadn't acted, there would be no forest standing."
Many of the married women had already been acting independently, accompanying their husbands in some activities, according to Gilderlan Rodrigues da Silva, the Maranhão coordinator of the Indigenous Missionary Council (CIMI), a Catholic Church-affiliated organization, who has worked with the women warriors. "But, from the moment they created the women's group, they gained strength and visibility," he said in an interview. "Once they were formed, there was this very strong change. Both in the context of decreasing the invasions and waking up to the collective awareness to protect the territory."
The Direct and Indirect Impacts of Greater Inclusion
The results are clearly visible. In 2018, there was only 63 hectares (156 acres) of deforestation in the reserve, compared to 2016, when deforestation reached a high of 2,000 hectares (4,940 acres), according to Global Forest Watch. "The biggest achievement I see today in my village is because of the territorial protection, there are no loggers within our territory, and we managed to combat the sale of wood," Cícera Guajajara da Silva said.
The women's association has also been instrumental in connecting with other Indigenous groups similarly seeking to protect their territories, such as the Ka'apor, Awa-Guaja, and other Guajajara communities.
"There are 16 Indigenous territories in Maranhão — we have to seek unity to move forward in our struggle," said Maísa Guajajara, one of the original women warriors. Through coordination with other women's groups, like the Articulation of Indigenous Women of Maranhão (AMIMA), they were able to bring 200Indigenous women from around the state together for the first time in 2017 to talk about various issues, including territorial protection, reforestation, and environmental education.
"This whole movement is extremely important because it shows this strength, and that women have a lot to contribute to the movement because they are part of the territory and are concerned with it, and with future generations," Rodrigues da Silva told Mongabay.
They don't just coordinate with other Indigenous groups; they also conduct training with neighboring communities about the importance of environmental conservation. "Not all women do surveillance work because we know it is dangerous work, but there are always some who do," Maísa Guajajara said. "The warriors generally do more surveillance activities outside the territory, we give lectures around our territory to talk about the invasions within our territory, and we raise awareness in the villages by talking about the importance of keeping nature standing." For example, the women warriors are partners in the Mãe D'água (Mother of Water) project that, together with the Brazilian NGO Fórum da Amazônia Oriental (FAOR), provides support for Indigenous women to strengthen their collective actions against ongoing deforestation and water pollution. These actions include visits to nearby riverine communities in which the women warriors explain their ways of living, such as hunting and rituals, to their neighbors. For the women warriors, the more that their neighbors know about Guajajara culture, the more they will respect their actions to defend their territory.
Why Women Are Key to Forest Conservation
In Brazil, and around the world, Indigenous women are increasingly at the forefront of environmental movements.
"The struggle of Indigenous women happens in different ways, day by day. If I am here today, I am the fruit of the women who came in front of me," Taynara Caragiu Guajajara, a member of the Indigenous women's collective AMIMA, said during a live online event in April. "In the context of the world we live in today, we have been conquering space inside and outside the community. We Indigenous women have not always had that voice … but today the struggle is driven by Indigenous women, we are the ones who are in charge of the struggle."
Maisa Guajajara, march of indigenous women, Brasilia, 2019. Marquinho Mota / FAOR
Women are increasingly leading the struggle on issues like climate change, but their voices are heard much less often then men's— to the detriment of everyone. This is partially a byproduct of gender bias in journalism itself.
In 2015, of every four people interviewed, mentioned or seen in the news worldwide, only one was a woman, according to a report by the Global Media Monitoring Project, which releases its findings every five years. A closer look at the data shows that even when women are interviewed, it is for personal quotes, rather than for their expertise. It's a figure that seems to have barely budged over the past few years, although some newsrooms are starting to actively change that.
Studies show that, in general, women receive greater exposure in newspaper sections led by female editors, as well as in newspapers whose editorial boards have higher female representation. But men are disproportionately represented from editors through to reporters, meaning that critical issues for women often go unreported. One of these areas is precisely the connection between conservation solutions and gender equality.
Women are disproportionately affected by climate change and environmental degradation. Mounting evidenceshows that gender gaps and inequalities, such as inequitable land tenure and women's reduced access to energy, water and sanitation facilities, negatively impact human and environmental well-being. The climate crisis will only make gender disparities worse.
Gender-based violence against women environmental human rights defenders in particular is on the rise, and increasingly normalized in both public and private spheres, making it more difficult for women to get justice. As Indigenous communities are often on the front lines of defending their territories, resources and rights from extractive projects and corporate interests, Indigenous women in particular face a two-headed beast of gender-based violence and racism.
"We fought to defend our territory against invasions and we sought this autonomy to fight for rights," Taynara Caragiu Guajajara said in an interview. "Being a woman is difficult within the macho society, but being an Indigenous or black woman becomes even more difficult, because the prejudice is so great."
Having more women involved in everything from environmental decision-making to climate politics benefits society at large. Higher femaleparticipation in policymaking increases the equality and effectiveness of climate policy interventions;evidence shows that high gender inequality is correlated with higher rates of deforestation, air pollution and other measures of environmental degradation.
Yet less than 1%of international philanthropy goes to women's environmental initiatives, and women are continuouslyleft outof decisions about land and environmental resources.
"The global community cannot afford to treat nature conservation and the fight for women's equality as separate issues — they must be addressed together," said Grethel Aguilar, the acting director-general of the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN), on international women's day this year.
Map of Maranhão state in northeastern Brazil.
Why the Fight for Indigenous Territorial Rights in Brazil Matters to Conservation
Tracking tree cover loss in Maranhão over the past two decades shows the crucial importance of Indigenous territories in protecting intact forest. Viewed from space, as the forest cover rapidly disappears, the outlines of Indigenous territories become more and more distinct.
"These Indigenous territories are islands of green in a sea of deforestation in one of the worst deforested places in Brazil," Shenker said.
The Caru Indigenous Territory, for example, has seen 4% forest loss in comparison to the state of Maranhão, which has lost almost a quarter of its tree cover since 2000, according to Global Forest Watch data. Alongside the various other benefits that come with forest preservation, the forests in the Caru Indigenous Territory are also home to some of the last uncontacted Awá people; video of of two Awá men taken in the neighboring Araribóia Indigenous Territory made international headlines last year.
These patches of intact, tropical forests are also the crux of "natural climate solutions" protection. These solutions essentially entail stopping deforestation, improving management of forests, and restoring ecosystems, and could provide more than one-third of the cost-effective climate mitigation needed between now and 2030 to stabilize warming to below 2° Celsius (3.6° Fahrenheit).
According to one of the seminal papers on natural climate solutions, the single most effective approach in the tropics has proven to be actively protecting intact forests. Protecting intact forests offers twice as much of the cost-effective climate mitigation potential as the second best pathway, reforestation. The Amazon as a whole plays a vital role in mitigating climate change by absorbing and storing carbon dioxide in its forests. When cut down, burned, or degraded through logging, the forest not only ceases to fulfill this function, but can become a source of carbon emissions.
"Protecting and or conserving intact ecosystems is the number-one priority," said Kate Dooley, a research fellow at the Australian-German Climate & Energy College at the University of Melbourne, who has authored several papers on the potential of forests as a natural climate solution. "Way-way-way down the line is planting trees. And even then, it needs to be the right kind of trees."
Of all the countries in the world with some kind of tropical rainforest, Brazil holds more mitigation potential than 71 of the 79 countries combined, according to a recent paper on this topic. It isn't too hyperbolic, then, to say that groups like the women warriors are protecting humanity's last best hope for a livable future.
"Plenty of research showing that forests are more intact in collectively held lands," Dooley said. "With or without secure land tenure those lands are more intact and less degraded." According to a report in 2018 by the Rights and Resources Initiative, almost 300 billion metric tons of carbon are stored in collectively managed lands across all forest biomes, and numerous studies have found that the best way to protect forests is to empower the people who live in them, granting them land rights and legal standing.
This is especially true for Indigenous-held lands in places like Brazil. Between 2000 and 2015, legally designated Indigenous territories in Brazil saw a tenththe amount of forest loss than non-Indigenous territories. Brazil is home to approximately 900,000 Indigenous citizens from 305 peoples, most of who live in Indigenous territories. Even so, more than half of the locations claimed by Indigenous groups have not yet received formal government recognition.
"Surveillance and inspection by Indigenous peoples is extremely important, as they are the ones who know the territory and the region best," Rodrigues da Silva said. "On the other hand, unfortunately they are left alone, the Indigenous body responsible for inspection ends up not fulfilling the role and leaving only the Indigenous people."
Prevailing Amid Growing Threats
Despite an increasingly hostile government, the women warriors say they are committed to continuing their monitoring, surveillance and educational activities, and are hoping to inspire other groups to do the same.
"Today women act 100% in defense of the territory," Paula Guajajara said. "Today we are serving as an example."
But the work is daunting.
Brazil has the rights of Indigenous people written into its constitution of 1988, and is a signatory to the International Labour Organization's (ILO) Indigenous and Tribal Peoples Convention. Yet, the current administration of President Jair Bolsonaro has made it clear that Indigenous peoples won't be allowed tocomment on infrastructure projectsaffecting Indigenous territories in the Amazon. Bolsonaro's administration has also proposed opening up Indigenous territories to extractive activities — something the constitution specifically prohibits.
Hundreds of people have been killed during the past decade in the context of conflicts over the use of land and resources in the Amazon — many by people involved in illegal logging — according to the Pastoral Land Commission (CPT), a Catholic Church-affiliated nonprofit that follows land conflicts.
But perpetrators of violence in the Brazilian Amazon are rarely brought to justice.
Of the more than 300 killings that the CPT has registered since 2009, only 14 ultimately went to trial. Maranhão, where the Guajajara live, is among the most dangerous states for Indigenous people in Brazil: more attacks on Indigenous groups were reported here than anywhere else in 2016, according to data from the CPT.
The coronavirus poses an additional threat to Indigenous peoples throughout the Amazon and especially in Brazil, where the death rate from COVID-19 is much higher than the national rate.
"The surveillance expeditions are stopped by the pandemic, we are not doing surveillance, to care for everyone in the village," Cícera Guajajara da Silva said. "Especially in order to protect our health, because nobody knows who the types of people [invaders] are inside the forest, they may even be infected with the virus, the invader himself can bring the virus to our territory, and that's why we stopped [the expeditions], we are now only sheltering in the village."
But despite the mounting difficulties, the women warriors are committed to continuing their work.
"We have the courage to defend our territory," Maisa Guajajara said. "I am a woman and I will fight against all the threats that are in our territory."
==
"Just when I thought the destruction couldn't get any worse, it has," says Nobre, one of Brazil's leading scientists who has studied the Amazon — its unique flora and fauna, and its influence on both the local and global climate — for more than 40 years.
"In terms of the Earth's climate, we have gone beyond the point of no return. There's no doubt about this."
For decades, he has fought against deforestation. There have been considerable ups and downs in that time, but he points out that Brazil was once a world-leader in controlling deforestation.
"We developed the system that's now being used by other countries," he told Climate News Network in an interview during his lecture tour of the UK.
"Using satellite data, we monitored and we controlled. From 2005 to 2012, Brazil managed to reduce up to 83% of deforestation."
Dramatic Increase
Then the law on land use was relaxed, and deforestation increased dramatically — by as much as 200 percent between 2017 and 2018.
It's all become much worse since Jair Bolsonaro became Brazilian president at the beginning of last year, Nobre says.
"There are some dangerous people in office," he says. "The Minister of Environment is a convicted criminal. The Minister of Foreign Affairs is a climate sceptic."
Nobre argues that Bolsonaro doesn't care about the Amazon and has contempt for environmentalists.
His administration is encouraging the land grabbers who illegally take over protected or indigenous tribal land, which they then sell on to cattle ranchers and soybean conglomerates.
For indigenous tribes, life has become more dangerous. "They are being murdered, their land is being invaded," Nobre says.
In August last year, the world watched as large areas of the Amazon region — a vital carbon sink sucking up and recycling global greenhouse gases — went up in flames.
Nobre says the land grabbers had organised what they called a "day of fires" in August last year to honour Bolsonaro.
"Thousands of people organized, through WhatsApp, to make something visible from space," he says. "They hired people on motorbikes with gasoline jugs to set fire to any land they could."
The impact on the Amazon is catastrophic, Nobre says. "Half of the Amazon rainforest to the east is gone — it's losing the battle, going in the direction of a savanna.
"When you clear land in a healthy system, it bounces back. But once you cross a certain threshold, a tipping point, it turns into a different kind of equilibrium. It becomes drier, there's less rain. It's no longer a forest."
As well as storing and recycling vast amounts of greenhouse gas, the trees in the Amazon play a vital role in harvesting heat from the Earth's surface and transforming water vapour into condensation above the forest. This acts like a giant sprinkler system in the sky, Nobre explains..
When the trees go and this system breaks down, the climate alters not only in the Amazon region but over a much wider area.
Time Running Out
"We used to say the Amazon had two seasons: the wet season and the wetter season," Nobre says. "Now, you have many months without a drop of water."
Nobre spent many years living and carrying out research in the rainforest and is now attached to Brazil's National Institute for Space Research (INPE).
The vast majority of Brazilians, he says, are against deforestation and are concerned about climate change — but while he believes that there is still hope for the rainforest, he says that time is fast running out.
Many leading figures in Brazil, including a group of powerful generals, have been shocked by the international reaction to the recent spate of fires in the Amazon and fear that the country is becoming a pariah on the global stage.
Nobre is angry with his own government, but also with what he describes as the massive conspiracy on climate change perpetrated over the years by the oil, gas and coal lobbies.
Ever since the late 1970s, the fossil fuel companies' scientists have known about the consequences of the build-up of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.
"They brought us to this situation knowingly," Nobre says. "It's not something they did out of irresponsible ignorance. They paid to bash the science."Jessica Rawnsley is a UK-based environmental journalist. She has written stories on the Extinction Rebellion movement and police tactics connected with demonstrations. She has a particular interest in campaigning groups and their influence on government climate policies. ===Antonio Donato Nobre is passionate about the Amazon region and despairs about the level of"Just when I thought the destruction couldn't get any worse, it has," says Nobre, one of Brazil's leading scientists who has studied the Amazon — its unique flora and fauna, and its influence on both the local and global climate — for more than 40 years.
"In terms of the Earth's climate, we have gone beyond the point of no return. There's no doubt about this."
For decades, he has fought against deforestation. There have been considerable ups and downs in that time, but he points out that Brazil was once a world-leader in controlling deforestation.
"We developed the system that's now being used by other countries," he told Climate News Network in an interview during his lecture tour of the UK.
"Using satellite data, we monitored and we controlled. From 2005 to 2012, Brazil managed to reduce up to 83% of deforestation."
Dramatic Increase
Then the law on land use was relaxed, and deforestation increased dramatically — by as much as 200 percent between 2017 and 2018.
It's all become much worse since Jair Bolsonaro became Brazilian president at the beginning of last year, Nobre says.
"There are some dangerous people in office," he says. "The Minister of Environment is a convicted criminal. The Minister of Foreign Affairs is a climate sceptic."
Nobre argues that Bolsonaro doesn't care about the Amazon and has contempt for environmentalists.
His administration is encouraging the land grabbers who illegally take over protected or indigenous tribal land, which they then sell on to cattle ranchers and soybean conglomerates.
For indigenous tribes, life has become more dangerous. "They are being murdered, their land is being invaded," Nobre says.
In August last year, the world watched as large areas of the Amazon region — a vital carbon sink sucking up and recycling global greenhouse gases — went up in flames.
Nobre says the land grabbers had organised what they called a "day of fires" in August last year to honour Bolsonaro.
"Thousands of people organized, through WhatsApp, to make something visible from space," he says. "They hired people on motorbikes with gasoline jugs to set fire to any land they could."
The impact on the Amazon is catastrophic, Nobre says. "Half of the Amazon rainforest to the east is gone — it's losing the battle, going in the direction of a savanna.
"When you clear land in a healthy system, it bounces back. But once you cross a certain threshold, a tipping point, it turns into a different kind of equilibrium. It becomes drier, there's less rain. It's no longer a forest."
As well as storing and recycling vast amounts of greenhouse gas, the trees in the Amazon play a vital role in harvesting heat from the Earth's surface and transforming water vapour into condensation above the forest. This acts like a giant sprinkler system in the sky, Nobre explains..
When the trees go and this system breaks down, the climate alters not only in the Amazon region but over a much wider area.
Time Running Out
"We used to say the Amazon had two seasons: the wet season and the wetter season," Nobre says. "Now, you have many months without a drop of water."
Nobre spent many years living and carrying out research in the rainforest and is now attached to Brazil's National Institute for Space Research (INPE).
The vast majority of Brazilians, he says, are against deforestation and are concerned about climate change — but while he believes that there is still hope for the rainforest, he says that time is fast running out.
Many leading figures in Brazil, including a group of powerful generals, have been shocked by the international reaction to the recent spate of fires in the Amazon and fear that the country is becoming a pariah on the global stage.
Nobre is angry with his own government, but also with what he describes as the massive conspiracy on climate change perpetrated over the years by the oil, gas and coal lobbies.
Ever since the late 1970s, the fossil fuel companies' scientists have known about the consequences of the build-up of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.
"They brought us to this situation knowingly," Nobre says. "It's not something they did out of irresponsible ignorance. They paid to bash the science."
Jessica Rawnsley is a UK-based environmental journalist. She has written stories on the Extinction Rebellion movement and police tactics connected with demonstrations. She has a particular interest in campaigning groups and their influence on government climate policies. ...'This is a Sick Statement': Brazil's Bolsonaro, Under Pressure for Anti ... ›
amazon rainforest rainforests forests deforestation biodiversity jair bolsonaro brazil
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new sci report net emitter carbon by __
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https://theconversation.com/indigenous-people-may-be-the-amazons-last-hope-130941
==
https://secure.earthjustice.org/site/R?i=ntYlzkOm1PlsNWyJMPYRJA
activist
amazonwatch 1219
We have been holding back industrial development and resource extraction in the Amazon all decade: from stopping the Tapajos mega-dam on the last free-flowing Amazon River tributary in Brazil, to backing Sarayaku's precedent-setting legal victory when the Inter-American Court ruled that Ecuador had violated their rights by allowing oil drilling on their land, to winning the historic $9.5 billion judgement against Chevron for deliberately polluting the Ecuadorian Amazon, to standing with the U’wa people of Colombia who successfully dismantled the Magallanes gas project on their sacred lands.
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==
https://theconversation.com/statistic-of-the-decade-the-massive-deforestation-of-the-amazon-128307
This year, I was on the judging panel for the Royal Statistical Society’s International Statistic of the Decade.
Much like Oxford English Dictionary’s “Word of the Year” competition, the international statistic is meant to capture the zeitgeist of this decade. The judging panel accepted nominations from the statistical community and the public at large for a statistic that shines a light on the decade’s most pressing issues.
On Dec. 23, we announced the winner: the 8.4 million soccer fields of land deforested in the Amazon over the past decade. That’s 24,000 square miles, or about 10.3 million American football fields.
This statistic, while giving only a snapshot of the issue, provides insight into the dramatic change to this landscape over the last 10 years. Since 2010, mile upon mile of rainforest has been replaced with a wide range of commercial developments, including cattle ranching, logging and the palm oil industry.
This calculation by the committee is based on deforestation monitoring results from Brazil’s National Institute for Space Research, as well as FIFA’s regulations on soccer pitch dimensions.
Calculating the cost
There are a number of reasons why this deforestation matters – financial, environmental and social.
First of all, 20 million to 30 million people live in the Amazon rainforest and depend on it for survival. It’s also the home to thousands of species of plants and animals, many at risk of extinction.
Second, one-fifth of the world’s fresh water is in the Amazon Basin, supplying water to the world by releasing water vapor into the atmosphere that can travel thousands of miles. But unprecedented droughts have plagued Brazil this decade, attributed to the deforestation of the Amazon.
During the droughts, in Sao Paulo state, some farmers say they lost over one-third of their crops due to the water shortage. The government promised the coffee industry almost US$300 million to help with their losses.
Finally, the Amazon rainforest is responsible for storing over 180 billion tons of carbon alone. When trees are cleared or burned, that carbon is released back into the atmosphere. Studies show that the social cost of carbon emissions is about $417 per ton.
Finally, as a November 2018 study shows, the Amazon could generate over $8 billion each year if just left alone, from sustainable industries including nut farming and rubber, as well as the environmental effects.
Financial gain?
Some might argue that there has been a financial gain from deforestation and that it really isn’t a bad thing. Brazil’s president, Jair Bolsonaro, went so far as to say that saving the Amazon is an impediment to economic growth and that “where there is indigenous land, there is wealth underneath it.”
In an effort to be just as thoughtful in that sense, let’s take a look. Assume each acre of rainforest converted into farmland is worth about $1,000, which is about what U.S. farmers have paid to buy productive farmland in Brazil. Then, over the past decade, that farmland amounts to about $1 billion.
The deforested land mainly contributes to cattle raising for slaughter and sale. There are a little over 200 million cattle in Brazil. Assuming the two cows per acre, the extra land means a gain of about $20 billion for Brazil.
Chump change compared to the economic loss from deforestation. The farmers, commercial interest groups and others looking for cheap land all have a clear vested interest in deforestation going ahead, but any possible short-term gain is clearly outweighed by long-term loss.
Rebounding
Right now, every minute, over three football fields of Amazon rainforest are being lost.
What if someone wanted to replant the lost rainforest? Many charity organizations are raising money to do just that.
At the cost of over $2,000 per acre – and that is the cheapest I could find – it isn’t cheap, totaling over $30 billion to replace what the Amazon lost this decade.
Still, the studies that I’ve seen and my calculations suggest that trillions have been lost due to deforestation over the past decade alone.
==
yikes OMFG note models not good at tip pt
https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/top-scientists-warn-of-an-amazon-tipping-point/2019/12/20
dec. 20, 2019 at 12:14 p.m. PST
Deforestation and other fast-moving changes in the Amazon threaten to turn parts of the rainforest into savanna, devastate wildlife and release billions of tons carbon into the atmosphere, two renowned experts warned Friday.
“The precious Amazon is teetering on the edge of functional destruction and, with it, so are we,” Thomas Lovejoy of George Mason University and Carlos Nobre of the University of Sao Paulo in Brazil, both of whom have studied the world’s largest rainforest for decades, wrote in an editorial in the journal Science Advances.“Today, we stand exactly in a moment of destiny: The tipping point is here, it is now.”
Combined with recent news that the thawing Arctic permafrost may be beginning to fill the atmosphere with greenhouse gases, and that Greenland’s ice sheet is melting at an accelerating pace, it’s the latest hint that important parts of the climate system may be moving toward irreversible changes at a pace that defies earlier predictions.
The speed of the transformation in some key systems, such as Greenland’s ice and the Arctic’s permafrost, has “indeed been underestimated by climate science,” said Stefan Rahmstorf, the head of Earth system analysis at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany. “And that’s partly because we cannot really capture them well in our models.”
In interviews, Lovejoy and Nobre said they decided to sound a dire alarm about the Amazon after witnessing the acceleration of troubling trends. The combination of rising temperatures, crippling wildfires and ongoing land clearing for cattle ranching and crops has extended dry seasons, killed off water-sensitive vegetation and created conditions for more fire.... The Amazon is 17 percent deforested, but for the large portion of it inside Brazil, the figure is closer to 20 percent. The fear is that soon there will be so little forest that the trees, which not only soak up enormous quantities of rainwater but also give off mist that aids agriculture and sustains innumerable species, won’t be able to recycle enough rainfall.At that point, much of the rainforest could decline into a drier savanna ecosystem. Rainfall patterns would change across much of South America. Several hundred billion tons of carbon dioxide could wind up in the atmosphere, worsening climate change. And such a feedback loop would be tough to reverse.
That point of no return, commonly referred to by scientists as a tipping point, “is much closer than we anticipated,” Nobre said in an interview.
The troubling news comes on top of other alarming developments regarding the Earth’s climate.
This month, nearly 100 scientists detailed how the Greenland ice sheet’s losses have accelerated in recent decades, growing from 33 billion tons lost per year in the 1990s to a current average of 254 billion tons annually.
“Greenland is losing ice faster than expected, partly because climate models aren’t good at predicting extreme melting events, but also because many of the ice sheet’s smaller glaciers have started to speed up, too,” said Andrew Shepherd, a glaciologist at the University of Leeds in Britain who led the latest study. “So the [worst]-case scenario now becomes business as usual."
Separately, a report this month from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration laid out evidence suggesting that the global Arctic already has become a net emitter of carbon dioxide because of the thawing permafrost. That would be a profound shift for a region that includes vast stretches of Alaska, Canada, Siberia and Greenland, and which has long stored massive amounts of carbon in its frozen soil.
At the same time, a global die-off of coral reefs in 2016 and 2017, which included the loss of nearly half of Australia’s Great Barrier Reef, shocked scientists.
“Compared to coral bleaching in 1998 and 2002, the 2016 event was much more extreme — hotter, far more extensive, and deadlier,” said Terry Hughes, an expert on the reef and the director of the ARC Center of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies at James Cook University in Australia. “The reef has changed forever."
While the speed of the changes involving the Amazon, permafrost and ice sheets has surprised experts, models that scientists created decades ago regarding the average global temperature have largely held true.
The world has experienced about 1 degree Celsius, or 1.8 degrees Fahrenheit, of warming since the late 19th century, largely because of greenhouse gas emissions from human activity.
But much of the Arctic has already warmed by 2 degrees Celsius and some regions even more.
The Amazon also is warming at an accelerated rate. An analysis by The Washington Post of global temperature changes found that almost the entirety of Brazil has warmed by more than 1.5 degrees Celsius, or 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit, since the late 1800s.
Higher temperatures and deforestation are drying out parts of the Amazon and posing a fundamental threat to the rainforest.
In the southern Amazon dry season in particular, temperatures are already 3 degrees Celsius higher than in the 1980s, and the dry season is getting longer, exceeding four months in some regions, Nobre said.
Particularly worrying, he said, is a recent study showing how trees are faring in more than 100 locations across the Amazon. Led by Adriane Esquivel Muelbert of the University of Leeds, researchers found forest transition has begun — trees accustomed to dry conditions are more likely to grow now while trees that require more moisture are disproportionately dying in places where climate changes are the greatest.
Paulo Brando, a tropical ecologist and professor at the University of California at Irvine who has long studied the Amazon, said it is tricky to try to determine the tipping point.
"The definition of ‘tipping point’ can be quite broad,” Brando said, so it is difficult to say whether the Amazon has reached what scientists would call a point of irreversible change. But this much is clear, he added: “We’re not moving away from that tipping point. We’re probably driving very fast toward that direction.”
The impact of changes to the Amazon reach far beyond South America. The rainforest stores an immense amount of carbon in its enormous trees, and if they die, that carbon is released.
In a radically different part of the world, scientists last week described something eerily similar.
Ted Schuur, an expert on northern permafrost at Northern Arizona University, wrote in NOAA’s 2019 Arctic Report Card that recent studies suggest that the thawing of the permafrost — a repository for millennia of dead plant and animal remains — is likely to be contributing carbon dioxide to the atmosphere as those once-frozen materials begin to decompos.
For the “science community at large,” Schuur said in an email, “this is a ‘surprising’ confirmation that the data show the Arctic currently acting as a carbon source.”
Schurr’s reasoning is based heavily on a groundbreaking study led by Susan Natali of the Woods Hole Research Center, research that is in many ways parallel to the new Amazon study. It pools the results from large numbers of scientists across the Arctic to show that in winter, permafrost soils are already emitting a lot of carbon. And those releases are probably enough to offset what happens in the growing season, when Arctic plant growth absorbs carbon.
The models that scientists have used to try to determine how the Arctic region is processing carbon were too conservative when it came to losses in winter in particular, Natali said. As a result, the potential for a transition of the Arctic from a “sink” that takes up carbon to a “source” that emits it may have been underestimated.
"The models, they project that to be happening quite a ways out in the future, but I would say it’s happening now,” Natali said.
Occasional extreme heat events in the Arctic can cause abrupt hillside collapses or “thaw slumps,” which rapidly expose very old and deep permafrost to the open air. Meanwhile, worsening Arctic fires can quickly remove insulating soil and vegetation layers from large stretches of permafrost, suddenly exposing it to the sun.
“It’s like you’re opening the top of a cooler,” Natali said.
In combination, the Amazon and Arctic news underscores that even as humans are largely failing to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, the Earth may increase such emissions yet further.
Still, it is possible to slow the transformation of the Amazon through reforestation, researchers said.
“A tipping point is a way to talk about a moment of system shift or system change,” Lovejoy said. “In this case, it’s not going to be instantaneous, and that’s good news. It allows you to do something about it.”
==
==
ref
https://advances.sciencemag.org/content/5/12/eaba2949
Amazon tipping point: Last chance for action
Thomas E. Lovejoy and Carlos Nobre
See all authors and affiliations
Science Advances 20 Dec 2019:
Vol. 5, no. 12, eaba2949
DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.aba2949
==
yikes
https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/top-scientists-warn-of-an-amazon-tipping-point/2019/12/20
dec. 20, 2019 at 12:14 p.m. PST
Deforestation and other fast-moving changes in the Amazon threaten to turn parts of the rainforest into savanna, devastate wildlife and release billions of tons carbon into the atmosphere, two renowned experts warned Friday.
“The precious Amazon is teetering on the edge of functional destruction and, with it, so are we,” Thomas Lovejoy of George Mason University and Carlos Nobre of the University of Sao Paulo in Brazil, both of whom have studied the world’s largest rainforest for decades, wrote in an editorial in the journal Science Advances. “Today, we stand exactly in a moment of destiny: The tipping point is here, it is now.”
Combined with recent news that the thawing Arctic permafrost may be beginning to fill the atmosphere with greenhouse gases, and that Greenland’s ice sheet is melting at an accelerating pace, it’s the latest hint that important parts of the climate system may be moving toward irreversible changes at a pace that defies earlier predictions.
The speed of the transformation in some key systems, such as Greenland’s ice and the Arctic’s permafrost, has “indeed been underestimated by climate science,” said Stefan Rahmstorf, the head of Earth system analysis at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany. “And that’s partly because we cannot really capture them well in our models.”
In interviews, Lovejoy and Nobre said they decided to sound a dire alarm about the Amazon after witnessing the acceleration of troubling trends. The combination of rising temperatures, crippling wildfires and ongoing land clearing for cattle ranching and crops has extended dry seasons, killed off water-sensitive vegetation and created conditions for more fire.How we know that global warming is real]
The Amazon is 17 percent deforested, but for the large portion of it inside Brazil, the figure is closer to 20 percent. The fear is that soon there will be so little forest that the trees, which not only soak up enormous quantities of rainwater but also give off mist that aids agriculture and sustains innumerable species, won’t be able to recycle enough rainfall.At that point, much of the rainforest could decline into a drier savanna ecosystem. Rainfall patterns would change across much of South America. Several hundred billion tons of carbon dioxide could wind up in the atmosphere, worsening climate change. And such a feedback loop would be tough to reverse.
That point of no return, commonly referred to by scientists as a tipping point, “is much closer than we anticipated,” Nobre said in an interview.
The troubling news comes on top of other alarming developments regarding the Earth’s climate.
This month, nearly 100 scientists detailed how the Greenland ice sheet’s losses have accelerated in recent decades, growing from 33 billion tons lost per year in the 1990s to a current average of 254 billion tons annually.
“Greenland is losing ice faster than expected, partly because climate models aren’t good at predicting extreme melting events, but also because many of the ice sheet’s smaller glaciers have started to speed up, too,” said Andrew Shepherd, a glaciologist at the University of Leeds in Britain who led the latest study. “So the [worst]-case scenario now becomes business as usual."
Separately, a report this month from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration laid out evidence suggesting that the global Arctic already has become a net emitter of carbon dioxide because of the thawing permafrost. That would be a profound shift for a region that includes vast stretches of Alaska, Canada, Siberia and Greenland, and which has long stored massive amounts of carbon in its frozen soil.
At the same time, a global die-off of coral reefs in 2016 and 2017, which included the loss of nearly half of Australia’s Great Barrier Reef, shocked scientists.
“Compared to coral bleaching in 1998 and 2002, the 2016 event was much more extreme — hotter, far more extensive, and deadlier,” said Terry Hughes, an expert on the reef and the director of the ARC Center of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies at James Cook University in Australia. “The reef has changed forever."
While the speed of the changes involving the Amazon, permafrost and ice sheets has surprised experts, models that scientists created decades ago regarding the average global temperature have largely held true.
The world has experienced about 1 degree Celsius, or 1.8 degrees Fahrenheit, of warming since the late 19th century, largely because of greenhouse gas emissions from human activity.
But much of the Arctic has already warmed by 2 degrees Celsius and some regions even more.
The Amazon also is warming at an accelerated rate. An analysis by The Washington Post of global temperature changes found that almost the entirety of Brazil has warmed by more than 1.5 degrees Celsius, or 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit, since the late 1800s.
Higher temperatures and deforestation are drying out parts of the Amazon and posing a fundamental threat to the rainforest.
In the southern Amazon dry season in particular, temperatures are already 3 degrees Celsius higher than in the 1980s, and the dry season is getting longer, exceeding four months in some regions, Nobre said.
Particularly worrying, he said, is a recent study showing how trees are faring in more than 100 locations across the Amazon. Led by Adriane Esquivel Muelbert of the University of Leeds, researchers found forest transition has begun — trees accustomed to dry conditions are more likely to grow now while trees that require more moisture are disproportionately dying in places where climate changes are the greatest.
Paulo Brando, a tropical ecologist and professor at the University of California at Irvine who has long studied the Amazon, said it is tricky to try to determine the tipping point.
"The definition of ‘tipping point’ can be quite broad,” Brando said, so it is difficult to say whether the Amazon has reached what scientists would call a point of irreversible change. But this much is clear, he added: “We’re not moving away from that tipping point. We’re probably driving very fast toward that direction.”
The impact of changes to the Amazon reach far beyond South America. The rainforest stores an immense amount of carbon in its enormous trees, and if they die, that carbon is released.
In a radically different part of the world, scientists last week described something eerily similar.
Ted Schuur, an expert on northern permafrost at Northern Arizona University, wrote in NOAA’s 2019 Arctic Report Card that recent studies suggest that the thawing of the permafrost — a repository for millennia of dead plant and animal remains — is likely to be contributing carbon dioxide to the atmosphere as those once-frozen materials begin to decompos.
For the “science community at large,” Schuur said in an email, “this is a ‘surprising’ confirmation that the data show the Arctic currently acting as a carbon source.”
Schurr’s reasoning is based heavily on a groundbreaking study led by Susan Natali of the Woods Hole Research Center, research that is in many ways parallel to the new Amazon study. It pools the results from large numbers of scientists across the Arctic to show that in winter, permafrost soils are already emitting a lot of carbon. And those releases are probably enough to offset what happens in the growing season, when Arctic plant growth absorbs carbon.
The models that scientists have used to try to determine how the Arctic region is processing carbon were too conservative when it came to losses in winter in particular, Natali said. As a result, the potential for a transition of the Arctic from a “sink” that takes up carbon to a “source” that emits it may have been underestimated.
"The models, they project that to be happening quite a ways out in the future, but I would say it’s happening now,” Natali said.
Occasional extreme heat events in the Arctic can cause abrupt hillside collapses or “thaw slumps,” which rapidly expose very old and deep permafrost to the open air. Meanwhile, worsening Arctic fires can quickly remove insulating soil and vegetation layers from large stretches of permafrost, suddenly exposing it to the sun.
“It’s like you’re opening the top of a cooler,” Natali said.
In combination, the Amazon and Arctic news underscores that even as humans are largely failing to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, the Earth may increase such emissions yet further.
Still, it is possible to slow the transformation of the Amazon through reforestation, researchers said.
“A tipping point is a way to talk about a moment of system shift or system change,” Lovejoy said. “In this case, it’s not going to be instantaneous, and that’s good news. It allows you to do something about it.”
==
https://www.globalwitness.org/en/campaigns/forests/money-to-burn-how-iconic-banks-and-investors-fund-the-destruction-of-the-worlds-largest-rainforests/
see global wit
https://www.globalwitness.org/en/campaigns/forests/money-to-burn-how-iconic-banks-and-investors-fund-the-destruction-of-the-worlds-largest-rainforests/
no lnx many
Forest burning - Reuters
Article / Sept. 23, 2019
MONEY TO BURN
More than 300 banks and investors back six of the world’s most harmful agribusinesses to the tune of $44bn
Barclays, HSBC and Santander among high street names behind companies implicated in rainforest destruction.
Iconic investment banks such as Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan, Bank of America and Morgan Stanley also among key financiers.
The burning of the Brazilian Amazon this summer illustrated in the most graphic way possible humanity’s war on the planet.
But such scenes play out every year in rainforests all around the world to make way for big agribusiness, away from the horrified stare of global television audiences. These forests are earth’s front-line defence against climate breakdown. One famous study published in 2017 estimated that forests and other ecosystems could make up more than a third of the total carbon mitigation by 2030 needed to limit global heating to a 2° Celsius rise.
Yet between 2001 and 2015, over 300 million hectares of tree cover was destroyed: nearly the size of India. About a quarter of this loss was driven by the production of commodities such as beef and palm oil, according to a recent study. It also found that in south-east Asia alone, deforestation for growing commodities such as palm oil is responsible for as much as 78% of tree cover loss. This is madness.
That being the case, it is unsurprising many banks and investors proudly trumpet policies on ethical dealing, promising not to pump money into companies that fell and burn precious rainforests. There is only one problem: the same financial institutions often break their own policies at will, making them barely worth the paper they are printed on. A Global Witness investigation now exposes the sheer size and scale of these financial flows – and reveals how a veritable A to Z of global finance is enabling the destruction of the world’s biggest rainforests.
The companies razing forests to produce palm oil, beef, and rubber are currently able to secure financing for new projects at commercially attractive rates from banking hubs in the US, Europe and Asia. Global Witness investigated the financing of six huge agribusinesses: three operating in the Amazon, two in the Congo Basin, and one in New Guinea.
Global Witness has discovered that between 2013 and 2019, they were backed to the tune of $44 billion by over 300 investment firms, banks, and pension funds headquartered across the globe. The household name institutions our exposé highlights will be familiar to anyone who has looked at the skyline of Wall Street or Canary Wharf, read a quality newspaper or opened a current account.
While some of these institutions have developed their own deforestation policies, there is no penalty if they ignore them – and they often do. Governments’ failure to regulate the financing of deforestation has left the foxes in charge of the hen-house. Members of the public may be shocked to learn the institutions they bank with enable the sort of apocalyptic destruction witnessed in the Brazilian Amazon this summer.
Ordinary people’s pension funds and investments are channelled into companies revving up the climate crisis, stripping indigenous peoples of their ancestral lands and destroying the forests home to untold numbers of species.
Over the last decade, many financial institutions have committed to tackling deforestation, so often associated with human rights abuses or corruption. One group of 56 investors To inspect full datasets see bottom of page.jpgmanaging approximately $7.9 trillion in assets has urged the palm oil sector to commit to no-deforestation policies. Some 12 banks adopted the Soft Commodities Compact, aiming to achieve net zero deforestation by 2020 in the soy, palm oil, beef and pulp/paper supply chains of around 400 companies with combined sales of 3.5 trillion euros.
But there remains little transparency and accountability over how banks put commitments into practice, and signatories now admit they will miss the 2020 target. Meanwhile, the world’s largest financial institutions continue to sink vast sums into companies either levelling forests themselves or via other companies, often in blatant violation of their own deforestation policies and public commitments.
The NGO Global Canopy assessed 150 financial institutions and found nearly two-thirds had no policy covering four key forest-risk commodities, beef, soy, palm oil and timber. Yet as our investigation shows, even existing policies are widely ignored.
[
One of the most biodiverse regions in the world is being cleared, mostly to make room for a single species: cattle. Image credit: Getty Images
Global Witness can now reveal some of the largest names in global finance – Barclays, Deutsche Bank, HSBC, Santander and Standard Chartered among them—provided tens of billions of dollars in financing between 2013 and 2019 to companies either directly or indirectly deforesting the largest rainforests in the world. Leading investment banks including JPMorgan Chase, Goldman Sachs, Bank of America, and Morgan Stanley are also implicated. And what you are about to read only scratches the surface of a global systems failure.
WHAT WE DID...
==
https://theintercept.com/2019/11/25/amazon-bolsonaro-dorothy-stang-brazil/
Doti ...Stang was a pioneer in popularizing the concept of sustainability in the far reaches of the Amazon. Since the 1980s, she had united female rural leaders, encouraged the organization of settlers into collectives, and taught sustainable forest management to workers with no formal education. She wasn’t content to let people starve while the federal government was the largest landowner in the country, and enormous areas were unused or barely occupied. The PDSs, for her, were a way to guarantee sustenance for impoverished families and protect the environment at the same time.
Such was Stang’s dedication to helping the poor that she often sheltered families in the blue-green house where she lived, right beside the church in Anapu, a city in the state of Pará. While she was working on establishing the PDSs, Stang sometimes slept in the corridors of INCRA’s offices to pressure them, INCRA employees say. Despite her advanced age, she would take a bus to meetings in Belém, a distant 372 miles from Anapu, and go by motorcycle to access remote corners of the forest. Noemi Miyasaka, a professor at the Federal University of Pará who had followed Stang’s efforts since 1999, told me, “She was tireless and never gave up.”
The missionary’s work was urgent — and remains so — because Pará, a state bigger than Texas and California put together, is the deforestation capital of the world’s largest tropical forest. The missionary chose Pará for two settlements, Esperança and Virola-Jatobá, comprising 260 square miles.
...
==
Climate Crimes
UNDER LEFT AND RIGHT-WING LEADERS, THE AMAZON HAS BURNED. CAN LATIN AMERICA REJECT OIL, RANCHING, AND MINING?
Alexander Zaitchik
The social gains of the pink tide were real, and striking. But they were ephemeral, and the cost to the environment was high.
https://theintercept.com/2019/12/07/amazon-latin-america-extractivism/
https://www.democracynow.org/2019/11/4/paulo_paulino_guajajara_amazon_indigenous_killings
indigenous forest protector named Paulo Paulino Guajajara was shot dead in the Amazon by illegal loggers on Saturday. It is the latest incident in a wave of violence targeting indigenous land protectors since the election of Brazil’s far-right President Jair Bolsonaro last year. Guajajara was killed when he and another forest protector were ambushed by a group of illegal loggers inside the Araribóia reservation in the northeastern state of Maranhão. We speak with João Coimbra Sousa, a field coordinator and legal adviser for Amazon Watch, in São Luís in the northeastern state of Maranhão. And in San Francisco, we speak with Christian Poirier, program director at Amazon Watch.
...
There are markets that are sustaining these actors, these logging mafias, the worst actors in Brazil’s agribusiness sector, that are exporting commodities to the North. We are buying these products; we are complicit in what’s happening today. And our financial institutions, institutions like JPMorgan Chase and BlackRock, BNP Paribas, Santander in Spain, are fueling this crisis with their money to the worst actors in the soy, in the beef and in the timber industries, for example, that are decimating the Amazon and its peoples today. We have a responsibility in the North.
==
In Paraguay, rural communities facing deforestation see power – and profit – in a beloved drink
Peter Friederici, Northern Arizona University
Yerba mate is a wildly popular South American tea with a growing global market. Can this 'superfood' save Paraguay's tropical forests, too?
==
At Least 500 Jaguars Lost Their Lives or Habitat in Amazon Fires
ew 919
==
https://www.hrw.org/news/2019/09/17/brazil-criminal-networks-target-rainforest-defenders
SSão Paulo) – Deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon is driven largely by criminal networks that use violence and intimidation against those who try to stop them, and the government is failing to protect both the defenders and the rainforest itself, Human Rights Watch said in a report released today.
The 165-page report, “Rainforest Mafias: How Violence and Impunity Fuel Deforestation in Brazil’s Amazon,” documents how illegal logging by criminal networks and resulting forest fires are connected to acts of violence and intimidation against forest defenders and the state’s failure to investigate and prosecute these crimes.
“Brazilians who defend the Amazon are facing threats and attacks from criminal networks engaged in illegal logging,” said Daniel Wilkinson, acting environment and human rights director at Human Right Watch. “The situation is only getting worse under President Bolsonaro, whose assault on the country’s environmental agencies is putting the rainforest and the people who live there at much greater risk.”
The criminal networks have the logistical capacity to coordinate large-scale extraction, processing, and sale of timber, while deploying armed men to intimidate and, in some cases, kill those who seek to defend the forest, Human Rights Watch found.
On September 23, 2019 the United Nations will hold a summit meeting to discuss global efforts to mitigate climate change. As its contribution to those efforts, Brazil committed in 2016 to eliminate illegal deforestation in the Amazon by 2030.
Human Rights Watch interviewed more than 170 people, including 60 members of Indigenous communities, and other local residents in the states of Maranhão, Pará, and Rondônia. Researchers also interviewed dozens of government officials in Brasília and throughout the Amazon region, including many who provided inside accounts of how President Jair Bolsonaro’s policies are undermining enforcement efforts.
...
https://theintercept.com/2019/08/30/amazon-rainforest-fire-blackrock-jbs/
...FINK, the influential chief executive of BlackRock, which manages more than $6 trillion in investments, wants the public to know that he is using his enormous power to press companies to “serve a social purpose.” Fink — a Democratic donor who reportedly promised to help Joe Biden get elected president — wrote to businesses his firm invests in last year to urge them to consider their “impact on the environment” and the threat of climate change.
“Stakeholders are pushing companies to wade into sensitive social and political issues,” Fink wrote in a follow-up letter this year, “especially as they see governments failing to do so effectively.”
That desire to be seen as an ethical investor has not, however, stopped BlackRock from contributing to the climate crisis by providing significant financing to the world’s biggest meatpacker, JBS, which has been caught year after year buying cattle raised on illegally deforested Amazon land.
At least some of the thousands of fires burning huge swathes of the rainforest in Brazil, eroding a crucial safeguard against climate change, appear to have been started by cattle farmers. Cattle ranching is “the largest driver of deforestation in every Amazon country, accounting for 80 percent of current deforestation rates,” according to researchers at the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies.
As Christopher Ingraham of the Washington Post reported this week, cattle ranchers in Brazil “have been pushing their herds into the Amazon, clear-cutting and burning the forest as they go” to meet the surging demand for beef exported by Brazilian agribusiness firms to mainly China, Iran, Egypt, Russia, and the United States.
Related
A Top Financier of Trump and McConnell Is a Driving Force Behind Amazon Deforestation
About a third of that beef is exported by JBS, the spectacularly corruptBrazilian meat-packing conglomerate BlackRock is heavily invested in. But even as Fink publicly urged business leaders to consider their environmental impact, BlackRock increased its stake in JBS by $41 million between 2016 and 2018, according to research conducted for Friends of the Earth.
The Bureau of Investigative Journalism, The Guardian, and Repórter Brasil revealed in February that a giant ranching company that was fined for using deforested Amazon land delivered hundreds of heads of cattle raised in the Amazon to other farms the firm owned for fattening. Cattle was later sent from those farms to slaughter at JBS plants.
It’s not just private American capital that is funding the destruction of the Amazon. Public money is at work, too. President Donald Trump has been compensating American farmers hurt by his trade war to the tune of billions of dollars, and $62 million of that has gone to JBS, because the company has an American subsidiary.
As Colorado’s Greeley Tribune reported in May, “JBS USA secured nine contracts for federal purchases of JBS pork since mid-January, totaling nearly 18.5 million pounds of pork for $40.1 million. That’s in addition to previously awarded contracts for nearly 9.8 million pounds of pork for $22.3 million. In total, the company, a subsidy of Brazil-based JBS SA, will receive $62.4 million from the program, which is meant to mitigate trade war impacts to local farmers.”
In 2016, Fink was angling to become treasury secretary under Hillary Clinton.Fink was on the short list to replace Tim Geithner as President Obama’s treasury secretary, and in 2013, hired Cheryl Mills, a close aide to Clinton, at BlackRock. Just ahead of the 2016 election, he was endorsed for the position by Steve Schwarzman, a top Republican donor and the co-founder and CEO of Blackstone. Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., had promised to work to block any Clinton nominees from BlackRock.
BlackRock began as a fund inside of Blackstone, but Fink and Schwarzman had a falling out in the 1990s that led to a split. As The Intercept reported earlier this week, Blackstone is also heavily involved in deforestation of the Amazon, through its financing of highway and port projects that facilitate agribusiness.
According to a recent study by Amazon Watch, a nonprofit monitoring group, AgroSB, the JBS supplier, was fined in 2017 and 2018 by Brazil’s main environmental agency, known by its Portuguese acronym IBAMA. That agency has lost a quarter of its funding since January, when Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro, a far-right former army captain, took office promising to roll back protection for the Amazon to boost agribusiness. Government data provided to Reuters by opposition lawmakers showed that the cuts to IBAMA’s budget included a 23 percent reduction in funding for the prevention and control of forest fires.
This summer, the New York Times reported, “Ibama was unable to carry out operations in the state of Pará, where deforestation has been soaring, because the local police officers would not provide backup.”
As the Amazon burns, Bolsonaro has mocked environmentalists for nicknaming him “Captain Chainsaw,” disputed data from Brazil’s National Institute for Space Research showing that deforestation in the Amazon was up 88 percent in June compared to the same month in 2018, promised “to develop this wonderful region called the Amazon,” and even promoted a conspiracy theory that local environmentalists, not ranchers, had started the fires there.
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https://www.ecowatch.com/leaked-documents-bolsonaro-amazon-rainforest-2639991444.html
no lnx vid?
Leaked Documents Show Brazil’s Bolsonaro Has Grave Plans for Amazon Rainforest
openDemocracy Aug. 23, 2019 02:01PM EST POLITICS
Wildfires have raging through the Amazon rainforest for weeks.
Pixabay
By Manuella Libardi
Leaked documents show that Jair Bolsonaro's government intends to use the Brazilian president's hate speech to isolate minorities living in the Amazon region. The PowerPoint slides, which democraciaAbierta has seen, also reveal plans to implement predatory projects that could have a devastating environmental impact.
The Bolsonaro government has as one of its priorities to strategically occupy the Amazon region to prevent the implementation of multilateral conservation projects for the rainforest, specifically the so-called "Triple A" project.
"Development projects must be implemented on the Amazon basin to integrate it into the rest of the national territory in order to fight off international pressure for the implementation of the so-called 'Triple A' project. To do this, it is necessary to build the Trombetas River hydroelectric plant, the Óbidos bridge over the Amazon River, and the implementation of the BR-163 highway to the border with Suriname," one of slides read.
One of the slides from the presentation.
democraciaAbierta
In February, ministers Gustavo Bebianno (Secretary General of the Presidency), Ricardo Salles (Environment) and Damares Alves (Women, Family and Human Rights) had planned travel to Tiriós (Pará) to speak with local leaders about the construction of a bridge over the Amazon River in the city of Óbidos, a hydroelectric plant in Oriximiná, and the expansion of the BR-163 highway to the Suriname border. But this meeting was canceled.
A second meeting among government officials, also in February, used a PowerPoint presentation that details the projects announced by the Bolsonaro government for the region. The presentation, which was leaked to democraciaAbierta, argues that a strong government presence in the Amazon region is important to prevent any conservation projects from taking roots.
The slides are clear. Before any predatory plan is implemented, the strategy begins with rhetoric. Bolsonaro's hate speech already shows that the plan is working. The Amazon is on fire. It's been burning for weeks and not even those who live in Brazil were fully aware. Thanks to the efforts of local communities with the help of social networks, the reality is finally going viral.
The online reaction is far from being sensationalist. This year alone, Brazil had 72,000 fire outbreaks, half of which are in the Amazon. The National Institute for Space Research reported that its satellite data showed an 84% increase on the same period in 2018.
Attacking non-governmental organizations is part of the Bolsonaro government's strategy. According to another of the PowerPoint's slide, the country is currently facing a globalist campaign that "relativizes the National Sovereignty in the Amazon Basin," using a combination of international pressure and also what the government called "psychological oppression" both externally and internally.
This campaign mobilizes environmental and Indigenous rights organizations, as well as the media, to exert diplomatic and economic pressure on Brazilian institutions. The conspiracy also encourages minorities — mainly Indigenous and Quilombola (residents of settlements founded by people of African origin who escaped slavery) — to act with the support of public institutions at the federal, state and municipal levels. The result of this movement, they say in the presentation, restricts "the government's freedom of action."
So it is unsurprising that Bolsonaro's response to the fires comes in the form of an attack on NGOs. On Wednesday, August 21, Bolsonaro said he believed non-governmental organizations could be behind the fires as a tactic "to draw attention against me, against the government of Brazil."
Bolsonaro did not cite names of NGOs and, when asked if he has evidence to support the allegations, he said there were no written records of the suspicions. According to the president, NGOs may be retaliating against his government's budget cuts. His government cut 40 percent of international transfers to NGOs, he added.
Part of the government's strategy of circumventing this globalist campaign is to depreciate the relevance and voices of minorities that live in the region, transforming them into enemies. One of the tactics cited in the document is to redefine the paradigms of indigenism, quilombolism and environmentalism through the lenses of liberalism and conservatism, based on realist theories. Those are, according to a slide, "the new hopes for the Homeland: Brazil above everything!"
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Amazon Destruction Financed by BlackRock, World’s Biggest Investment Firm
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Brazil Rejects G7 Amazon Aid Amid Mounting Environmental Disaster
Prosecutors Investigate After Gov’t Ignored Warnings About Planned Amazon Fires
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https://theintercept.com/2019/08/23/gop-lobbyists-help-brazil-recruit-u-s-companies-to-exploit-the-amazon/
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SUMMER, fires are being used to clear wide swaths of the Amazon at an unprecedented rate. One-fifth of the Amazon has already been destroyed in the past 50 years; further industrialization of the rainforest risks destroying another fifth, a loss that would be catastrophic for the global ecosystem.
The disaster is widely blamed on interests seeking to clear the world’s largest rainforest for cattle ranching, mining, and export-focused agribusiness. Documents reveal that those interests are being pushed in the U.S. by Republican lobbyists, friendly with President Donald Trump’s administration, who entered into talks with the Brazilian government to promote corporate investment in the Amazon.
Related
On the Front Lines of Bolsonaro’s War on the Amazon, Brazil’s Forest Communities Fight Against Climate Catastrophe
The crisis in the Amazon comes as Brazil is now governed by an administration openly hostile to environmental concerns and Indigenous communities. President Jair Bolsonaro, a former Army captain once viewed as a fringe figure in Brazilian politics, has been referred to himself as “Captain Chainsaw” for his drive to promote logging and agribusiness in the Amazon.
Shortly after taking office in January, Bolsonaro slashed funding for Brazil’s main environmental agency by 24 percent. And this week, after a report by Brazil’s space research center revealed that fires in the Amazon are up 83% this year, Bolsonaro blamed the fires on international NGOs rather than his own anti-environmental policies.
MEANWHILE, A MEMBER of the Brazilian government has contracted with Washington lobbyists to continue selling land and destroying the forest.
In June, Wilson Lima, the governor of the state of Amazonas, a northwestern province in Brazil that governs approximately a third of the Amazon, including the epicenter of the current forest fire crisis, began work with the Interamerica Group, a Washington, D.C.–based lobbying firm founded by Jerry Pierce Jr. Kellen Felix, a Brazilian national and vice president at Interamerica Group, is also listed in a disclosure filing for work with the state of Amazonas. Lima, elected last year, is a member of PSC, a conservative party affiliated with the Assembly of God, a rapidly growing Pentecostal church in Brazil.
The initial filings, disclosed under the Foreign Agents Registration Act through the Department of Justice, which regulates foreign lobbying, show that Pierce was tapped to represent Lima’s government in meetings with federal agencies and Congress.
The Interamerica Group has also already filed an informational packet assembled for U.S. companies on behalf of the Brazilian governor, promoting the Amazon region for its development potential. The packet lists mining, agribusiness, and the “Gas Chemical Industry” as “Opportunities” for American businesses — among the “Challenges” for these potential businesses is to “Ensure Forest Conservation."
In response to an inquiry from The Intercept, Pierce said that a final contract has not been signed. “Unfortunately the state of Amazon decided to hold off on contracting our firm for an indefinite period. Perhaps it will revisited in 2020,” Pierce wrote. He did not respond to a question about why his firm was already producing communications on behalf of the Lima government.
Pierce has written extensively on how both Trump and Bolsonaro are a boon for increased American business in Brazil. “Under a President Trump,” Pierce wrote in 2017 blog post on his company’s website, Brazil stands to become “a world leader in industries such as agribusiness, mining, banking, and aviation.” In more recent posts, Pierce celebrates the rise of right-wing Bolsonaro, declaring, “Donald Trump paved the way for a Bolsonaro victory.”
Pierce also previously served as an official at the Department of Housing and Urban Development during the administration of George H.W. Bush, and was a prominent fundraiser for President George W. Bush. Under George W. Bush, he achieved “Pioneer” status, an accolade given to supporters who raised at least $100,000 for Bush’s campaigns. In 2009, Pierce pleaded guilty to making illegal “conduit contributions,” a term that refers to campaign contributions made under another person’s name. He served three years probation.
Images on social media show Pierce, Felix, and other Interamerica Group officials appearing, in Pierce’s description, with members of President Donald Trump’s administration and at conservative movement events, including the CPAC convention and with Turning Point USA.
Lima is not the only regional official to forge ties with Trump-friendly politicians.
The Intercept previously reported that Lima’s predecessor, Gov. Amazonino Mendes, signed a controversial $1.6 million contract with Giuliani Safety & Security, a consulting firm affiliated with Rudy Giuliani, now a lawyer for Trump. The state of Amazonas has struggled with persistent poverty, drug smuggling, and crime — problems Mendes promised to solve through the contract with Giuliani’s firm.
The discussions with the Interamerica Group are among many American ties to business expansion into the Amazon. In April, the Brazil-American Chamber of Commerce, a trade group representing major banking and commodity interests, held an event on how U.S. investors can take advantage of Brazilian agribusiness in the current political climate.
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aha-let: separation allows demonization: X hate America; dems are trying to destrpy the cty and then:
Brazil's right-wing President Jair Bolsonaro is giving President Trump a run for his money in the alternative facts department.
Responding to international outrage following the news that there are record numbers of wildfires burning in the Amazon rainforest, Bolsonaro tried to shift the blame away from his pro-business administration and onto an unlikely culprit: non-governmental organizations.
"Everything indicates" that NGOs were planning to set fires to the forest, Bolsonaro said on Facebook Live Wednesday, as Reuters reported. When asked if he had proof, he could not provide any, answering that he had "no written plan."
Later the same day, he repeated the claims at a steel industry congress in Brasilia, The Guardian reported.
"On the question of burning in the Amazon, which in my opinion may have been initiated by NGOs because they lost money, what is the intention? To bring problems to Brazil," he said.
Environmental groups, however, say that the fires are a result of deforestation encouraged by Bolsonaro's policies. He has promised to open the Amazon to mining and agriculture, and that has encouraged farmers to start illegal fires in order to clear land. Local papers report that farmers emboldened by weaker enforcement are even organizing "fire days" in some regions, according to The Guardian.
"This is a sick statement, a pitiful statement," Greenpeace Brazil Public Policy Coordinator Marcio Astrini told Reuters of Bolsonaro's remarks. "Increased deforestation and burning are the result of his anti-environmental policy."
The fires came to global attention this week when Brazil's space agency announced that the number of fires burning in the year since Bolsonaro took office were up more than 80 percent when compared with the year before. On Wednesday, the hashtag #PrayforAmazonas was the No. 1 trending topic on Twitter worldwide.
Experts attribute the fires to deforestation because this year has not been particularly dry.
"In the previous years [wildfires] were very much related to the lack of rain, but it has been quite moist this year," ecologist Adriane Muelbert told National Geographic. "That leads us to think that this is deforestation-driven fire."
Farmers and ranchers start fires to clear forest for soy or grazing land, but the fires then catch and spread. If this continues, ecologist and National Geographic Explorer-at-Large Thomas Lovejoy explained to the nature magazine that it could have devastating consequences for the rainforest, and for the world:
Lovejoy describes a cyclical system in which deforestation fuels forest loss, making the region drier, spurring even more deforestation. Much of the rain in the Amazon is generated by the rainforest itself, but as trees disappear, rainfall declines. Experts worry that this downward spiral could increasingly dry out the forest and push it to a point of no return, where it more resembles savannah than rainforest.
"The Amazon has this tipping point because it makes half of its own rainfall," says Lovejoy. That's why, he says, "the Amazon has to be managed as a system."
Not only would such a change endanger the 40,000 species of plants, 1,300 species of birds, 430 mammals and 400 to 500 indigenous communities that call the Amazon home, it would also make it harder to fight the climate crisis. The world's largest tropical rainforest is an important store of carbon, absorbing millions of tons of emissions per year.
Given the global stakes, it's no wonder that Bolsonaro has come under international scrutiny for his policies, as The Guardian explained. Both Germany and Norway recently suspended donations to the Amazon Fund, and there is pressure for the EU to block a trade agreement with Brazil and other countries in South America.
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