The End of the Amazon

This is the third of five blogs-slash-essays on how the breakdown of ecosystems around the planet will likely impact global civilization’s ability to feed all the many billions of people in the coming decades. This is the first of three natural catastrophes in-the-making.

The Amazon will likely disappear by century’s end, impossible as that may seem. All the world’s tropical rainforests are being fast whittled away—at a dizzying rate of 7.3 million hectares a year, according to recent estimates.[i] That’s about 26 American football fields a minute, almost a gridiron every two seconds. And the pace is accelerating.  The rainforests of the three largest rainforest systems, the Amazon, Congo, and Indonesia-New Guinea are now in a vicious feedback loop where natural processes are amplifying human-caused deforestation.[ii] The Amazon, although by far the largest of them, will be the first to go. The massive dieback of the Amazon will surely rank as one of the greatest tragedies in all human history. When the rainforest vanishes, so will about a fifth of all the planet’s species, forty percent of tropical rainforest biomass, and a tenth of the terrestrial biomass.[iii]

Encompassing 5.5 million square kilometers (550 million hectares) of contiguous rainforest, Amazonia exists as a vast miracle of continual self-perpetuation. To begin with, evaporation of water from the leaves’ pores (the stomata) cools the forest in the same way that our perspiration cools our bodies, preventing overheating and death of its trees during the tropical summers. This and the shade of the majestic canopy provides protection for the trillions of life-forms inhabiting the forest as well as for the trees themselves. At the largest scale, the Amazon perpetuates itself by recycling rain from the Atlantic Oceans, generating, in essence, much of its own humidity.[iv] Trees transport water from their roots up the trunk to the leaves, where much of the water is then evaporated. The water vapor rises from billions of trees, condenses into clouds that are then sent westward by the prevailing winds, returning as rain. This process—rain, evaporation, condensation, rain—repeats itself as many as six times across the Amazon basin before reaching the Andes.[v] In this way, as Robert Walker, professor of geography and Latin American studies,  describes it, “tropical forests act as moisture pumps in delivering water vapor from the oceans to continental interiors.[vi]  It is the Amazon’s size that keeps this process going, and this process maintains its size.

But in the past fifty years, the forces of climate change and agriculture have been drying out the Amazon basin, rapidly turning the rainforest into savanna.[vii] The rainforest is usually fire-resistant because it is so moist.[viii] However, rising air temperatures and increased heat waves, droughts, deforestation, and fires (both wildfires and the “controlled” burnings started by ranchers and farmers), each in their own way, are drying out the forest, fragmenting what was once unbroken canopy, and weakening the ecosystem’s overall powers of resistance.[ix] The burning away of the Amazon has been picking up speed and will likely end only when no forest remains.

The rate of deforestation in Brazil has fluctuated with its politics, but even during its best decade, between 2009 and 2018, nature enjoyed little respite [x] When deforestation slowed in Brazil, deforestation farther south in Brazil’s Moto Grosso and in the Gran Chaco forests of Paraguay and Argentina picked up the slack.[xi] And, since its nadir in 2012, deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon had been on the rise again.[xii] Logging and burnings spiked in 2019, when pro-business Jair Bolsonaro assumed the presidency, and has been accelerating since. Given that most of the arable Cerrado has already been converted into farmland, most everyone looking for land to ‘develop’ will be looking to do so by destroying more of the Amazon.[xiii]

The easiest way to remove a forest is to burn it. In the past thirty years, more than 78 million hectares of the Amazon has been destroyed, much of it intentionally incinerated, an average rate of 2.6 million hectares a year, more than nine football fields a minute, every minute of every day, without pause.[1] Eighty percent of that land has been converted to pastureland to accommodate the huge growth of the Brazilian beef cattle business, the world’s largest.[xiv] Most of the rest has gone to growing soybeans to feed those cattle in Brazil as well as large stocks in India and China.[xv] The tens of thousands of deliberate acts of arson each year involve a diverse and ever growing number of participants, from poor migrants carving themselves out a plot of land, to small gold mining operations, to the large-scale meatpacking companies like JBS, Marfrig, and Minerva.[xvi] Captured by satellite imagery, the awesome phalanx of fire lights the night sky like a string of great cities stretched across the Amazon basin.[xvii] Behind the walls of flame are left ugly, charred landscapes with thin, infertile soils that are unfit for farming. The land will soon be spent, so the ranchers and farmers will burn the next stand of trees, and then the next.

Fires often escape the controlled burnings. They scorch their way deeper into the forest, creating open pockets of barren ground. The charred remains serve as kindling and fuel for future fires.[xviii] Invasive grasses that thrive on periodic fires race to fill the void, inhibiting forest recovery.[xix] The trees around these sun-drenched spaces dry out, as do those at the newly singed forest edges, the latest border between forest and farm.[xx] They are now the most vulnerable to drought, heat waves, and the next burning. And the haze of smoke and soot that blows downwind prevents the nucleation needed for cloud formation, without which the forest further dries.[xxi] “In essence,” explains professor Robert Walker, “fire produces fire in a positive feedback loop intensified by deforestation and drought.”[xxii]

This is where climate change comes in. For the past fifty years, the Amazon basin and (to the east and south) the vast tropical savanna called the Cerrado—which together make up slightly more than half of the South American continent—have been heating up at rates, according to a recent study, “unparalleled elsewhere in the global tropics” and “exponentially faster than the global average.”[xxiii] Temperatures are exceeding tolerance thresholds for many of the tree species in the rainforest but not for those species that occupy the grasslands of the Cerrado.[xxiv] This temperature effect, in concert with the burnings and wildfires, is hastening the “savannization” of the Amazon basin.[xxv]

Climate change taxes rainforest ecosystems with its relentless barrage of new, unpredictable, and often extreme set of conditions. Heat waves and droughts in these tropical regions have become more frequent, longer, and more intense.[xxvi] A once-in-a-hundred-year drought has already occurred three times in this century’s first two decades—in 2005, 2010, and again in 2015-16.[xxvii] Each of these mega-droughts was stronger and more destructive to the Amazon than the previous one. In each, the resulting wildfires burned so much plant matter that the Amazon emitted more carbon dioxide than it absorbed in those years—a once rare occurrence, one that essentially turns off the air conditioning effect that the Amazon usually provides the planet.[xxviii]

Climate change and deforestation are mutually reinforcing processes. They occur simultaneously and involve complex feedbacks that amplify each other.[xxix] As drought, heat waves, wildfire, slash-and-burn, and the expansion of roads and all-weather highways continue to carve out the rainforest, the autocatalytic feedback system of rain and transpiration is slowing down.[xxx] As the trees disappear so do the rains. And as the rains disappear so the trees. Not only do the immediate areas suffer, mostly in the Amazon’s southern and eastern regions, but so do areas far west that are dependent on the waters brought there by the rainforest’s moisture pump.[xxxi] The entire rainforest is becoming hotter and drier, and fragmented and thinned out.

Ominously, the climate and weather patterns across the Amazon have been behaving with increasing volatility, a sign within complex systems that they are becoming unstable.[xxxii] Both the dry and wet seasons across much of the basin are getting longer and more intense.[xxxiii] It is during the dry seasons and droughts and heat waves that the rainforest is most vulnerable to dieback.[xxxiv] The climatic differences between regions are increasing, with wet areas getting wetter, and dry areas getting drier.[xxxv] Extreme events are more common now.[xxxvi] Hotter air dries out plants and soil. Then, when the evaporated water does eventually return, the rains are coming down in shorter but heavier bursts.[xxxvii] Now, even rains unravel the rainforest, as the waters erode the thin, unprotected soil in places the once thick canopy and understory had protected. Droughts are becoming longer, drier, and hotter, and floods are becoming more severe.[xxxviii] “These events, together…” write the ecologist Thomas Lovejoy and climate scientist Carlos Nobre, “… suggest that the whole system is oscillating” between forest and non-forest ecosystems.[xxxix] Piecemeal, the rainforest is losing resiliency.

The unraveling of the Amazon system is likely fast approaching that tipping point. Many scientists believe that, unless human activities change quickly and appreciably (and nothing indicates they might), the numerous stressors destabilizing this ecosystem will soon overwhelm the complex forest-rain feedback system.[xl] Once deforestation and degradation pass a currently unknown critical threshold, the rest of the forest will dieback quickly and uncontrollably, replaced by savanna, dry forests, and semi-arid scrubland.[xli]

Although impossible to predict precisely, mathematical models suggest that the critical point of no return will be when rainforest losses reach between 25 and 40 percent.[xlii] Somewhere between 17 and 20 percent of its original extent was already gone by 2020, and according to a study published in Nature Climate Change, three-quarters of the rest has ‘lost resilience,’ since 2000, meaning that those areas have lost the ability to recover from previous destruction and to resist further damage.[xliii]

Numerous studies find that, should destruction stay on pace, deforestation will reach forty percent around mid-century.[xliv] An analysis that focused on the impacts solely of climate change concluded that a global temperature rise of two degree Celsius (since pre-industrial averages) will cause a forty percent dieback of the Amazon rainforest, a temperature that, according to climatologist, will surely be exceeded in the latter half of this century.[xlv] In a study looking at the feedback effects of agricultural expansion and climate change, the business-as-usual scenarios produced deforestation that were as high as 65 percent in 2050.[xlvi]Another group of researchers concluded that, when all factors are accounted for, over half the Amazon rainforest “will be cleared, logged, damaged by drought or burned” by as early as 2030.[xlvii]

What is perhaps most astonishing is the speed at which our species has been able to dispense with this immense, imposing, seemingly impenetrable jungle. During its fifty-five million years, the Amazon rainforest has proved resilient through numerous and powerful geological, climatic, and human disturbances.[xlviii] Its extent has waxed and waned with the rising of the Andes mountains, major shifts of its northern coastlines, the changing of river courses, and the ebb and flow of glacial periods.[xlix] Amazonia has been warming 25 times faster than it did during the last glacial melting some thirteen thousand years ago.[l] And long before Europeans arrived in the mid-sixteenth century and wiped out the indigenous populations, millions of people were inhabiting and intensely landscaping large portions of the rainforest.[li] They changed the rainforest ecosystem but they did not obliterate it. We, on the other hand, will—in the short span of a human lifetime, in the blink of a geological eye—wipe this planetary wonder from the face of the Earth.

Its absence will surely be felt across the globe, impacting regional and planetary systems in all sorts of unwanted ways. The enormous Amazon basin and surrounding regions will become hotter and drier, and therefore less water will be available to many millions of South Americans for drinking, irrigation, and hydroelectric power (which provides over half of the continent’s energy and sixty-five percent of Brazil’s).[lii] Even in the best of times, the infertile soils of the deforested Amazon are less than a third as productive as those in southern Brazil.[liii] It will only get worse. As the forest continues to die back, precipitation will decrease, and the area will become drier. “Our results indicate that expansion of agriculture in Amazonia may be a no-win scenario,” report a group of researchers.[liv] “These climate feedbacks …  lead agriculture expansion in Amazonia to become self-defeating: the more agriculture expands, the less productive it becomes.[lv] And when the Amazon dies, so will the cattle and soy businesses that killed it.

The demise of the Amazon rainforest will be catastrophic for South American agriculture and a blow to global food security. A thousand miles southeastward lies the Río de la Plata basin, home to nearly two hundred million people in southern Brazil, Paraguay, Uruguay, Bolivia, and northern Argentina and one of the world’s largest producers of food and feed.[lvi] This population-dense, agriculture-rich region receives seventy percent of its moisture from the Amazon rainforest: the Atlantic rains that the rainforest pumps westward eventually hit the Andes mountains and are then channeled southeastward via vast air currents, dubbed ‘flying rivers,’ to the farmlands and cities and towns of the Río de la Plata basin.[lvii] When the Amazon moisture pump shuts off completely, the flying rivers will vanish. Brazil’s south will dry out, turning into desert, according to worst-case scenarios. The basin will be unable to support current populations of people and cattle and will be inhospitable to most crops.[lviii] Much of the farmland in this region will either be abandoned or be irrigated until aquifers dry out and then be abandoned. Because this region is one the world’s most important food exporters, losing it will have grave consequences for our global food system. In destroying the rainforest for farming, Brazil is killing both.[lix]

Again, theory is turning into reality ahead of schedule. The branch of the atmospheric waterway that flows to southern Brazil has already weakened.[lx] Starting in 2014, the region was hit by its worst drought in ninety years and then in the years leading to 2021 by another drought that was even worse.[lxi] During both crises, the water reservoirs of the Western Hemisphere’s largest city, São Paulo, dropped to less than five percent of their normal levels, and harvests of soy, corn, and rice decreased substantially in many areas, bankrupting smallholders on the supply side of the global food system and raising world prices for these commodities on the demand side.[lxii] This is occurring in Brazil, the world’s most water-endowed country, the world’s third largest exporter of food and world’s largest net exporter.   

The disappearance of the rainforest and the concomitant drying of the Amazon basin will have other global impacts, all of which will negatively impact the world’s farmlands. The grasslands and dry forests that replace the Amazon will store far less carbon than the rainforest, by some 53-70 billion tons.[lxiii] That carbon—once stored in the forest plant life and equal to about six years’ worth of current human emissions—will be released into the atmosphere, compounding global warming.[2] From then on, the region, which absorbs about 600 million tons of carbon annually, will instead will be a permanent carbon emitter.[lxiv] Already, the Amazon basin is beginning to transform from a global coolant to another significant factor in global warming.

The Amazon’s outsized role in the planet’s hydrologic system is another reason its demise, as Robert Walker warned, “has been identified as a ‘tipping element’ of the earth’s climate system.”[lxv] The Amazon River delivers almost a fifth of all the planet’s continental freshwater run-off to the oceans.[lxvi] About an equal amount is believed to evaporate from the rainforest and make its way as rain over much of South America.[lxvii] It takes a lot of energy to evaporate water, hundreds of times more than it takes to raise its temperature.[3] In the process of evaporation, water absorbs this energy from the forest, is transported by winds, and then when the water condenses into clouds, all that latent energy is released again as heat. The movement of water from the Amazon rainforest into the atmosphere is therefore also a movement of tremendous amounts of energy, which, in turn, influences atmospheric circulation all over the planet.[lxviii] Computer models have found the dieback of the Amazon rainforest will profoundly alter weather patterns, for instance drying out areas as disparate as Indonesia, Australia, and the Indian Ocean regions, the North Atlantic, western Central America, and major food growing areas in the North American Midwest.[lxix] The impact on agriculture can only be speculated at this point, but the drying of American breadbasket states, home to some of the most reliably productive farmland in the world, will be one more unforeseen way that the Amazon affects human food security.

FOOTNOTES

[1] Skidmore et al. (2021). The damage to the rainforest is far greater than the deforestation reported, which includes only forest where tree crown cover has been reduced below ten percent (FAO, 2000:16), or has been completely converted to another land use type (Matricardi et al., 2020). That is, forest areas that are partially or mostly destroyed are not counted as deforestation. Furthermore, the canopy hides from satellite detection much of the destruction of the biomass underneath, the understory (Balch, 2014; Bullock et al., 2020; Matricardi et al., 2020; Vancutsem et al., 2021). Reported separately as degradation, this includes damage done to all the life beneath the tree crown by fire, logging, grazing, etc. Degradation significantly reduces forest resilience (Boulton et al., 2022). When degradation is accounted for, the total area of forest damage reported is more than doubled. For instance, Matricardi et al. (2020) found that, “From 1992 to 2014, the total area of degraded [Brazilian Amazon] forest was 337,427 km2 compared with 308,311 km2 that were deforested.”

[2] Emissions are often reported in tons of carbon dioxide. Scientists often speak in terms of carbon because in the bodies of living things, carbon is found in many molecular combinations. In the CO2 molecule, carbon makes up a little more than a quarter (0.27) of the weight. Carbon weighs 12 grams per mole. The two oxygen atoms together weigh 32 grams. Therefore, CO2 weighs 44 g ÷12 g = 3.67-fold more than C. Of the 35 billion tons of CO2 annually emitted since 2012, about 9.5 tons of that has been carbon.

[3] It takes 100 calories to heat a gram of water from 0˚C to 100˚ C (32˚F to 212˚F), and then 540 calories for that gram of water to evaporate. At room temperature, it takes even more energy (about 580 calories) for evaporation. Whatever provides that energy drops in temperature. That’s why perspiring cools our bodies.

ENDNOTES

[i] Watts (2018, March 23), Vancutsem et al. (2021).

[ii] Nepstad et al. (2008), Pokhrei, Fan, and Miguez-Macho (2014), Oliveras and Malhi (2016), Pearce (2018), Tyukavina et al. (2018), BBC (2019, Aug 26), Bergen (2019).

[iii] Nepstad et al. (2008), Balch (2014).

[iv] Nobre (2014), Staal et al. (2020), Walker (2020).

[v] Boers et al. (2017), Lovejoy, T., and Nobre (2018), Walker (2020).

[vi] Walker (2020).

[vii] Nobre (2014).

[viii] Alencar et al. (2006), Staal et al. (2020), Walker (2020), Araújo et al. (2021).

[ix] Nepstad et al. (1999, 2008), Bullock et al. (2020), Walker (2020), Tiwari et al. (2021), Costa et al. (2022).

[x] Vancutsem et al. (2021), Zalles et al. (2021).

[xi] Bowman et al. (2012), Baumann et al. (2016), Fehlenberg et al. (2017), Kalamandeen et al. (2018), Patel (2019), Chisleanschi (2020), Rocha (2021).

[xii] Siva et al. (2021).

[xiii] Baumann et al. (2016), Fehlenberg et al. (2017), Chisleanschi (2019),Ferrante and Fearnside (2019), Patel (2019), Popkin (2022).

[xiv] Bowman et al. (2012), Skidmore et al. (2021), Zalles (2021).

[xv] Butler (2018).

[xvi] Nepstad et al. (1999), Balch et al. (2010), Krause et al. (2019), Kimbrough (2020), Brice (2022), McCoy and Ledur (2022).

[xvii] See, for instance, Grant (2019) and Voiland (2020).

[xviii] Cochrane et al. (1999), Malhi et al. (2008), Nepstad et al. (2008).

[xix] Nepstad et al. (2008), Walker (2020).

[xx] Cochrane et al. (1999), Nepstad et al. (2008).

[xxi] Nobre (2014).

[xxii] Walker (2020).

[xxiii] Costa et al. (2022).

[xxiv] Nepstad et al. (2008), Araújo et al. (2021), Tiwari et al. (2021).

[xxv] Sampaio et al. (2007), Barlow and Perez (2008), Nepstad et al. (2008), Marengo et al. (2022).

[xxvi] Heat waves—Costa et al. (2022). Droughts—Abraham (2017), Erfanian et al. (2017), Lovejoy and Nobre (2018), Walker (2020).

[xxvii] Abraham (2017), Erfanian et al. (2017), Lovejoy and Nobre (2018), Steffen et al. (2018), Walker (2020), Boulton et al. (2022).

[xxviii] Boulton et al. (2022).

[xxix] Barlow and Perez (2008), Nepstad et al. (2008), Malhi et al. (2008), Walker (2020).

[xxx] Nobre (2014), Barkhordarian et al. (2019).

[xxxi] Boers et al. (2017).

[xxxii] Scheffer et al. (2009), Barnosky et al. (2012), The Global Food Security Programme (2017), Lovejoy and Nobre (2018), Walker (2020).

[xxxiii] Sampaio et al. (2007), Walker (2020).

[xxxiv] Oliveira et al. (2013).

[xxxv] Lovejoy and Nobre (2018), Haghtalab et al. (2020), Walker (2020).

[xxxvi] Nepstad et al. (2008), Walker (2020).

[xxxvii] Erfanian et al. (2017).

[xxxviii] Erfanian et al. (2017), Lovejoy and Nobre (2018), Walker (2020), Espinoza et al. (2022), Marengo et al. (2022).

[xxxix] Lovejoy and Nobre (2018).

[xl] Nepstad et al. (2008), Lovejoy and Nobre (2018), Fischer (2019), Walker (2020), Boulton et al. (2022).

[xli] Mayle et al. (2004), Malhi et al. (2008).

[xlii] Sampaio et al. (2007), Nepstad et al. (2008), Nobre (2014), Nobre et al. (2016), Boers et al. (2017), Lovejoy and Nobre (2018), Walker (2020).

[xliii] 17%—Bullock et al. (2020). 20%—Nobre (2014), Walker (2020). Resilience—Boulton et al. (2022).

[xliv] Soares-Filho et al. (2006), Nepstad et al. (2008), Oliveira et al. (2013).

[xlv] 2˚C—Steffen et al. (2018). Will exceed—Cox et al. (2000). Also, Malhi et al. (2008).

[xlvi] Oliveira et al. (2013).

[xlvii] Nepstad et al. (2008).

[xlviii] Maslin (2007).

[xlix] Horn (1997), Burnham and Johnson (2004), Mayle et al. (2004), Wade (2015), Albert, Val, and Hoorn (2018).

[l] Malhi et al. (2008).

[li] Mann (2005, 2008).

[lii] Werth and Avissar (2002), Sampaio et al. (2007), Oliveira et al. (2013), Nobre (2014), Erfanian et al. (2017), Watts (2018, Dec 20), Fisher (2019), Walker (2020), Araújo et al. (2021), Getirana et al. (2021), Marengo et al. (2022).

[liii] Nobre et al. (2016).

[liv] Oliveira et al. (2013).

[lv] Oliveira et al. (2013).

[lvi] FAO (2016).

[lvii] Rocha (2014), Boers et al. (2017), Lovejoy, T., and Nobre (2018), Walker (2020).

[lviii] Nombre (2014), Rocha (2014).

[lix] Oliveira et al. (2013), FAO (2016).

[lx] Slater (2019), Fearnside (2021).

[lxi] NASA (2014, 2021).

[lxii] Glickhouse (2015), Ritter, K. (2018), Slater (2019), Anand (2021), Naumann et al. (2021), Hibba (2022), USDA (2022), Vara and Mano (2022).

[lxiii] Steffen et al. (2018).

[lxiv] Kintisch (2015).

[lxv] Walker (2020).

[lxvi] Nepstad et al. (2008).

[lxvii] Nepstad et al. (2008), Nombre (2014).

[lxviii] Werth and Avissar (2002), Nepstad et al. (2008), Kalamandeen et al. (2018), Staal et al. (2020), Fearnside (2021).

[lxix] Werth and Avissar (2002).

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