An area bigger than Texas has disappeared from the Brazilian Amazon rainforest since the 1970s
basin, most of which sits within the borders of Brazil, contains 40% of the world’s tropical forests and accounts for 10-15% of the biodiversity of Earth’s continents. Since the 1970s nearly 800,000km² of Brazil’s original 4m km² of Amazon forest has been lost to logging, farming, mining, roads, dams and other forms of development—an area equivalent to that of Turkey, and bigger than that of Texas. Over the same period, the average temperature in the basin has risen by about 0.
But even without the biggest changes, Mr Bolsonaro’s government can still encourage, directly or indirectly, a large amount of deforestation, by not enforcing the laws that prohibit it. On February 28th the environment minister, Ricardo Salles, fired 21 of Ibama’s 27 state heads, following the president’s orders to “clean out” the agency. Most have yet to be replaced, including all but one in the Amazon states.
The Amazon is unique among tropical rainforests in that it produces a lot of its own rainfall. As moisture travels from the Atlantic to Peru, the Amazon’s trees recycle some of it; around half the forest’s rain is reused this way. Rainwater is pulled up from the roots to the canopy, where it is released back to the atmosphere to fall as rain again. Not only does this provide moisture to the region, the evaporation off the leaves also has a local cooling effect.
How plants respond to carbon-dioxide levels probably exacerbates matters. The more carbon dioxide in the air, the less air plants need to process in order to photosynthesise. The less air they take in, the less water vapour they let out. As a consequence, the plants both do less to cool their immediate environment and also make the atmosphere less moist. This has been shown to be happening in other watersheds, though there is not yet conclusive evidence from the Amazon.
The El Niño drought in 2015 was particularly severe. In Nova Xavantina more than a third of the trees in some of the Marimons’ study plots died in its aftermath. The region around the city of Santarém, farther north and deep in the Amazon, saw flames as tall as buildings tear through the forest, enveloping the canopy in thick black smoke that stretched for miles and turned the sunlight red. For months after the fires died down, the forest floor smouldered.
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