By Bruno Vander Velde
August 23, 2019
Four questions about the Amazon fires, answered
11 min
The news has also raised questions:
Where exactly are these fires occurring?
Is there any hope for restoring the forest in places where it has burned?
Aren’t some of these fires in protected areas?
Is there any hope of stopping the fires — and saving the Amazon from disaster?
Conservation International experts have some answers.
1. Here’s where the fires are — and what that tells us
This time-lapse shows satellite images of large fires in South America over the past few months; the Amazon ecosystem is outlined in light green, and heavily forest areas are in dark green. Near the end of the time-lapse — which represents the past few weeks — the map surges with red.
The red dots represent what are called “thermal anomalies” — in most cases, fires, says Kellee Koenig, a cartographer at Conservation International. “It means a hot place where it is hotter than it should be,” Koenig said. “So when it is in the forest, it is probably a fire.”
Some conclusions can be drawn from the patterns in the map, Koenig says — chiefly that there is little doubt that most of the fires are set by humans.
“As you get closer to some of the more recent fires, what you can also strongly see are these linear patterns, and that to me is really significant,” she said. “Fires can occur due to lightning, but those kinds of fires are not common in the rainforest, so you can be pretty confident that some of these things were manmade. When I see linear patterns in the middle of the Brazilian Amazon, those are along roads.”
As the map above makes clear — and in spite of the headlines — the fires are definitely not unique to Brazil, Koenig notes.
That said, this fire season was predicted to be worse than in the past, partly due to climate change, according to Karyn Tabor, senior director of ecological monitoring at Conservation International.
“Fires in the Amazon are always worse during an El Niño year, which is what it seems is emerging in 2019,” she said.
Such fires, she says, are never a good thing.
“The Amazon is not a fire ecology system,” Tabor said. “In other words, these forests are not meant to burn, unlike forests in the U.S. Fires in the Amazon cause the forest to become more susceptible to burning again in the future. Also, burning enables access for more deforestation deeper into the forest.”
Fires also reveal where ecosystems are degraded and need added protection before they are fully deforested, Tabor says. “Fires pose a huge threat to forest restoration sites in particular, so monitoring and preventing fire spread near these sites is critical to protect conservation efforts.”
2. Speaking of restoration: Even if the fires stopped, could the Amazon forest be fully restored?
The short answer: Yes.
“The areas in the Amazon that are currently being burned have a high restoration potential because the Amazonian ecosystem is incredibly resilient, and also because so many areas that are degraded are in close proximity to intact forest,” said Nikola Alexandre, who oversees Conservation International’s global restoration efforts. “That is important because the easiest, most cost-effective and fastest restoration method out there is natural regeneration” — essentially, simply allowing the forest to grow back.
The longer answer: It would take time — and effective efforts to leave the forest alone.
“Naturally regenerating tropical forests take about 20 years for forest cover to come back,” Alexandre said. “It takes another 50 years for 80 percent of species that were lost to come back, and then to get to some sort of ecosystem that resembles what was there before it was destroyed, that can take up to a century or a century and half.”
There are ways to hasten the process, he says.
That raises the question: What hope is there for restoring forests in areas of the Brazilian Amazon that have already been converted to agriculture?
In the case of cattle ranching, Alexandre cites examples of economically productive systems with up to 20 percent tree cover — beneficial because it brings shade, increases grass growth and retention, and provides some habitat for birds and insects.
Alexandre was quick to note two key potential obstacles to forest restoration in the burned areas.
The first was land tenure: We don’t always know whose land is being burned, he says.
“Ideally, once the current fires are put out, as much of the forested areas should be restored back to forest; pasture land already under production would then be transitioned to silvopastoralism to the extent possible,” Alexandre urged.
The second obstacle: The dreaded “tipping point.”
“As soon as about 20 percent of the Amazon is deforested, we’re over that tipping point. Once that happens, no amount of restoration can help.”
3. Isn’t much of the Amazon forest within ‘protected areas’? Why would those be burning?
Unfortunately, some protected areas — places set aside to conserve nature, such as national parks — are more “protected” than others.
The past few years have seen a wave of rollbacks in legal protections for protected areas, including Brazil, research from Conservation International has shown.
A recent study found that governments in 73 countries have removed more than 500,000 square kilometers (193,000 square miles) from protected areas and downgraded protections for an additional 1.65 million square kilometers (637,000 square miles). More than three-quarters of rollbacks of protections since 1892 have occurred since the year 2000.
Brazil is no stranger to such “PADDD” events — short for protected area downgrading, downsizing and degazettement — says Rachel Golden Kroner, a global expert on PADDD at Conservation International.
“We found that 4 percent of protected areas in Brazil were affected by PADDD events over the last 46 years,” she told Conservation News earlier this year. “While this is technically lower than in some other Amazonian countries, it’s a hotspot to watch closely.”
Deforestation in a given area can go hand in hand with the loss of legal protections in that area, she said.
“With this in mind, more forest loss due to fires could lead to more PADDD events.”
Despite clear correlations, more research is needed, she says, to match PADDD events against the new fires.
“We can track fires throughout the region in real time,” she said. “Tracking legal changes takes longer.”
4. What on Earth do we do about any of this?
We can still save the Amazon. But it’s going to take action on a large scale, and at multiple levels.
While it’s OK to worry, it’s critical to not give up: “Pessimists never get anything done,” Conservation International CEO M. Sanjayan told C-SPAN earlier this week.
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