Addressing the Amazon tipping point is more urgent than ever. REDD is not working. The worst thing we could do is trade the carbon stored in the Amazon against emissions from burning fossil fuels
The Amazon rainforest is rapidly approaching a tipping point. As deforestation increases the rainforest is in places already changing towards a drier ecosystem. Recent research published in Nature Communications found that at a global scale the Amazon rainforest is a “tipping element”, or “a site for which the crossing of some critical threshold could have major consequences for the state or development of the earth’s climate system”.
In 2021, researchers writing in Nature Climate Change reported that during the period 2010 to 2019, the Brazilian Amazon released more carbon that it stored.
Since 2019, of course, the Bolsonaro presidency has only made matters much, much worse. Deforestation reached a 15-year high under Bolsonaro.
How the forest dies
A recent article in The Washington Post is headlined, “How the forest dies”. It’s part of a series titled, “The Amazon, Undone”.
In the most recent article in the series, journalist Terrence McCoy writes,
For years, scientists have been warning that the Amazon is speeding toward a tipping point — the moment when deforestation and global warming would trigger an irreversible cascade of climatic forces, killing large swaths of what remained. If somewhere between 20 and 25 percent of the forest were lost, models suggested, much of the Amazon would perish.
About 18 percent of the rainforest is now gone, and the evidence increasingly supports the warnings. Whether or not the tipping point has arrived — and some scientists think it has — the Amazon is beginning to collapse.
McCoy writes about a 2021 article in Ecosystems that reported a “drastic ecosystem shift” in the middle Rio Negro floodplain in the central Amazon region. Following forest fires, rainforest has been replaced by savanna.
In the southeastern Amazon, where vast areas of forests have been cleared for cattle ranching, trees are dying off and being replaced by species that grow better in the drier climate. The temperature in the southeast has increased during the dry season by an average of 2.5°C. And rainfall has dropped by 25%.
In the southwestern Amazon, bamboo is spreading through land hit by fires and droughts.
The Washington Post reports that researchers believe that a local tipping point is imminent in Mato Grosso state.
McCoy covers Brazil for The Washington Post and made three visits to the city of Rio Branco in Acre state this year. Every rainy season sees floods in Rio Branco, and nearly every dry season sees droughts. “Scientists fear that the climate has already changed,” McCoy writes.
The local government delivers water in 4,200-gallon tankers every morning – to schools, hospitals, the prison, and communities that have no piped water.
The water cycle in the Amazon
In the 1970s, a Brazilian researcher called Enéas Salati made a remarkable discovery. About half of the water in the Amazon was generated by the forest itself.
McCoy describes the process: Trees with deep roots suck up water from the ground. They release the water back into the atmosphere by evapotranspiration. Winds from the Atlantic carry the moisture further west into the rainforest. The moisture forms rain, and the trees again suck the water up from the ground. The process keeps repeating, and a single water molecule can fall as rain up to six times.
But this cycle can be broken by drought, fire, or deforestation. Fewer trees mean less evapotranspiration and in turn less rain.
This is a vicious circle. Less rain means a drier, warmer forest that is more likely to go up in flames. Meanwhile the climate crisis means increasing temperatures, exacerbating the situation even further.
Rio Branco, Acre state
Rio Branco is reliant on recycled rain, because of its distance from the Atlantic. It is at the western edge of the “arc of deforestation” – a zone of deforestation covering a huge part of the southern Amazon.
Over the past 40 years in Acre, mean monthly rainfall from June to August has dropped by almost one-third. Climate scientist Bernardo Flores told The Washington Post that,
No other region is more affected by the arc of deforestation than the southwest. We see it already happening: Deforestation is depriving the forest of rain.
McCoy visited Rio Branco during the dry season. The sky was overcast with the smoke of forest fires. It was sometimes too hot for farmers to work in the fields. The river had reached historic lows.
Communities that had previously depended on the forest for fish from its streams and water from its pools were left with nothing to drink and not much to eat. They relied on tankers to deliver water.
McCoy visited an Indigenous reserve: Apurinã Indigenous Territory kilometre 124, BR-317.
Highway BR-317, built in 1956, brought the loggers who razed the forest. And the ranchers who dammed the creeks to capture water for their cattle, cutting off the territory’s main source. The game the Apurinã had hunted soon disappeared, and the Indigenous leader saw his own people, with little food and water, become agents of the forest’s destruction, tearing it down to become cattle ranchers themselves. Now the highway brings in the natural consequence of these losses: water deliveries.
Amazon tipping point and REDD
A perhaps surprising omission from many of the debates around the tipping point in the Amazon is what this might mean for REDD.
Obviously, protecting as much as possible of the Amazon rainforest remains crucially important. On a global scale, the amount of carbon stored in the Amazon’s trees and soils is vast, and would have a devastating impact on the climate if it were to be released to the atmosphere.
On a local scale, forests are crucially important to people’s livelihoods living in the Amazon basin. And yet, as McCoy notes, while deforestation depletes the water and it is the poor suffering the most, poverty is used as a reason for clearing yet more forest. Bolsonaro promised that “developing” the Amazon would bring prosperity. And while Bolsonaro lost the presidential election in October 2022, he won a clear majority in the arc of deforestation.
What is clear is that 15 years of REDD has failed to address the deforestation crisis in the Amazon.
Yet the German bank KfW describes the State of Acre as “a global pioneer in forest protection”. This claim is in dramatic contrast to the reporting of The Washington Post. The communities dependent on deliveries of water from the local government would be likely to challenge that claim.
Acre is part of Germany’s “REDD Early Movers Programme”, set up in 2011 by the Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ). Since 2012, Germany has given tens of millions of dollars of “results-based finance for verified emission reductions” to the State of Acre.
Yet deforestation in the State of Acre has been increasing in recent years. In 2021, 102,000 hectares of primary forest was lost in Acre out of a total of 118,000 hectares of tree cover loss.
REDD was supposed to create incentives for landholders to keep forests standing in exchange for payments for avoided emissions from deforestation and forest degradation. But as Lauren Gifford at the University of Arizona points out, “REDD was never designed to combat widespread state-sanctioned violence. If the people who manage the forests are dead or dispossessed, who is left to protect the land from development and extractivism?”
Apart from its failure to stop deforestation, or support Indigenous Peoples’ right, REDD has another colossal problem up its sleeve. There is no possible way that REDD as a carbon trading mechanism can help to address the climate crisis.
Burning fossil fuels is the main driver of the climate crisis. If the carbon stored in the Amazon rainforests trees is traded against greenhouse gas emissions from burning fossil fuels, the climate crisis will get worse.
And the worsening climate crisis means that temperatures in the Amazon basin will increase. Droughts will increase. Fires will increase. And the Amazon rainforest will tip to a savanna.