Brazil's Deforestation Down, But 1 Million Trees/Day Still Cut; Keystone Species Disappearing In Continuing Drought
Last edited Sun Jan 28, 2024, 03:41 PM - Edit history (1)
What a difference a year makes in the Brazilian Amazon. At the start of 2023, I wrote about the green shoots of the rainy season and feelings of hope inspired by the new president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, who promised to strengthen Indigenous rights and aim for zero deforestation. Twelve months on, both the vegetation and political optimism are drying up. The most severe drought in living memory has finally been broken, but the rains are late and weak compared with previous years. The Xingu River is far lower than normal for January. The pulse of forest growth is also fainter – the new vegetation does not push out as far into the road as it did last January. The neighbouring cattle pasture is faring even worse. The forage grasses, known as capim, were so severely burned that they have not grown back, leaving the hillsides brown and the cows emaciated. Several of the poor, skeletal beasts have escaped their fields and wandered towards our community in search of food. Local people say more than a dozen cows have died of starvation at this one ranch, and countless others elsewhere.
Less obvious, but in many ways more worrying, is the dearth of leafcutter ants. These large-mandibled insects are usually everywhere, slicing and carrying vegetation in columns to create fungal gardens in their nests, which spread out over dozens of metres in Gaudi-esque towers and mounds. Entomologists say these ants have the second most-complex societies on Earth, after humans, and they are the dominant herbivores in the South American tropics, trimming about a sixth of all the leaves produced in the forest. This stimulates new plant growth and enriches the soil. Not for nothing have these ants been described as ecosystem engineers. The mounds appear deflated, there is no newly excavated soil at the entrances, and not a single leafcutter ant to be seen. This is bizarre as a healthy colony can have 3.5 million members and they never previously stopped working. Entomologists tell me they may have relocated or been wiped out by the prolonged dry season. It is an alarming reminder that the weakening of forest resilience takes many forms and the impact of the drought remains incalculable.
EDIT
First, the all-important good news. Deforestation in the Amazon has slowed by about 50% over the past year. For the first time since 2018, the clearance rate was less than 10,000 sq km in the 12 months until 31 July. Still more encouraging, the loss of tree cover in Indigenous territories fell by 73%. The bad news is that, even with this deceleration, on average close to 1 million trees are still being chopped down or burned every day in the Amazon. Countless more died because of the drought and this will worsen the degradation of the forest. Overall, there is no doubt the Amazon finished 2023 in a worse condition than it started, though sadly that has been the case for every year in the past half century.
There are other causes for concern. The Amazon’s southern neighbour, the Cerrado savanna, suffered the largest devastation since 2016 as a result of the expansion of soy plantations and cattle ranching. This repeats the public relations ruse of earlier Lula administrations, which reduced deforestation in the globally centre-stage Amazon, while giving a green light to destruction of the important but lesser known Cerrado.
EDIT
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2024/jan/25/optimism-dries-up-amazon-lula-drifts-climate-priorities-brazil