What will ending deforestation mean for the future of the Amazon?
Brazil’s president-elect, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, was greeted with applause when he addressed the U.N. climate conference in Egypt on Nov. 16. As he had in his campaign, Lula pledged to stop rampant deforestation in the Amazon, which his predecessor, Jair Bolsanaro, had encouraged.
Forests play a critical role in slowing climate change by taking up carbon dioxide, and the Amazon rainforest absorbs one-fourth of the CO2 absorbed by all the land on Earth. This articles examines stresses on the Amazon and the Indigenous groups who live there.
The Amazon rainforest is vast, covering some 2.3 million square miles. It extends over eight countries, with about 60% of it in Brazil. And the destruction occurring there is also enormous.
From 2010 to 2019, the Amazon lost 24,000 square miles of forest — the equivalent of about 10.3 million U.S. football fields. Much of this land was turned into cattle ranches, farms and palm oil plantations.
“There are a number of reasons why this deforestation matters – financial, environmental and social,” wrote Washington University in St. Louis data scientist Liberty Vittert.
Forest clearance in the region threatens people, wild species and freshwater supplies along with the climate. “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,” Vittert concluded.
Much of the Amazon has been under state control for decades. In the 1970s, Brazil’s military government started encouraging farmers and miners to move into the region to spur economic development, while also setting some zones aside for conservation. More recently, however, Brazil’s government has made it easier for wealthy interests to seize large swaths of land — including in conservation areas and Indigenous territories.
Reviewing national laws and land holdings, University of Florida geographers Gabriel Cardoso Carrero, Cynthia S. Simmons and Robert T. Walker found that Brazil’s National Congress was expanding the legal size of private holdings in the Amazon even before Bolsonaro was elected in 2019.
In southern Amazonas state, Amazonia’s most active deforestation frontier, rates of deforestation started to rise in 2012 because of loosened regulatory oversight. The number and size of clearings that the researchers identified using satellite data increased after Bolsonaro took office.
“The global community can help by insisting that supply chains for Amazonian beef and soybean products originate on lands deforested long ago and whose legality is long-standing,” they observed.
Road building in the Amazon, which increased dramatically during Bolsonaro’s tenure, brings development and related threats like wildfires into wild areas. University of Richmond geographer David Salisbury saw it as an existential threat to Indigenous communities.
Indigenous residents of the Brazilian-Peruvian borderlands where Salisbury worked “understand that the loggers and their tractors and chainsaws are the sharp point of a road allowing coca growers, land traffickers and others access to traditional Indigenous territories and resources,” he reported. “They also realize that their Indigenous communities may be all that stands in defense of the forest and stops invaders.”
Several Indigenous women won office as federal deputies in Brazil’s recent elections, and Lula has pledged to protect Indigenous people’s rights.
A small handful of highly lucrative commodities are the main causes of deforestation in the Amazon and other tropical regions. In Brazil, much of the land is cleared for raising beef cattle or cultivating soy. In Indonesia and Malaysia, palm oil production is spurring large-scale rainforest destruction. Wood production is a major driver in Asia and Africa.
“Making the supply chains for these four commodities more sustainable is an important strategy for reducing deforestation,” wrote Texas State University geographer Jennifer Devine. But Devine also found a fifth factor interwoven with these industries: organized crime.
“Large, lucrative industries offer opportunities to move and launder money; as a result, in many parts of the world, deforestation is driven by the drug trade,” she reported. In the Amazon, for example, drug traffickers are illegally logging forests and hiding cocaine in timber shipments to Europe.
“National and industry leaders have to root organized crime and illicit markets out of these commodity chains,” Devine said.
This story is a roundup of articles from The Conversation’s archive. The Conversation is an independent and nonprofit source of news, analysis and commentary from academic experts; its website is theconversation.com.
