When asked to situate the world’s most iconic rainforest on a map, most people will pinpoint Brazil. And given the intense media coverage of the country’s deforestation and fires – concerns reached a peak under former president Jair Bolsonaro and his free-for-all approach – they might also imagine a thick black soot clinging to the remaining trees. While newly re-elected president Lula da Silva has vowed to prioritize the Amazon forest and sparked hope among environmentalists, deforestation in the Brazilian section of Amazon remains of deep concern.

That interest is only set to grow as Brazil gets ready to host a high-level meeting to renew the Amazon Cooperation Treaty Organization (ACTO) in the northern town of Belem on 8 and 9 August. Bringing together the eight countries containing the Amazon forest – Bolivia, Brazil, Colombia, Ecuador, Guyana, Peru, Suriname, and Venezuela – along with senior officials from the United States and France, the event will enable them to discuss how to attract investment, fight deforestation, protect indigenous communities and encourage sustainable development.

The meeting will also be the occasion for sustainability scientists such as ourselves to draw attention to one of the Amazonian ecosystems that will be just as vital to protect if we are to limit global warming to the safer threshold of 1.5C above pre-industrial levels: Bolivia.

One of the highest carbon-emitting countries per capita

I have studied the flows that contribute to deforestation in the Amazon for more than five years. Earlier this year, I met with academics, environmental NGOs, smallholder farmers, and multilateral development banks in Bolivia to learn more about their work to protect the Bolivian Amazon.

Bolivia is not only at the centre of the current international rush for lithium. It is also one of the world leaders in deforestation. According to Global Forest Watch, the country lost more than 3,3 million hectares of humid primary forest from 2002 to 2021 to deforestation, or the equivalent of 4 million soccer fields, with an exponential growth in deforestation rates of more than 5.5% per year over the last two decades.

Bolivia’s forests have also increasingly been forced to cope with a combination of drought and large wildfires. In 2020 alone, 4,5 million hectares were affected by such fires, of which more than 1 million hectares took place in protected areas (data from Fundación Amigos de la Naturaleza) – and the deforestation trend is worsening (see Figure 1). As a result, Bolivia has placed itself at the top of carbon-emitting countries per capita, with emissions of 25 tCO2eq per person per year – more than five times higher than the global average, ahead of large economies like the United States and the United Arab Emirates.

Accelerated deforestation might seem paradoxical in a country known internationally for its commitment to the “Rights of Mother Earth”. But it seems that the government has chosen to prioritize economic development based on natural resources over its promises to become stewards of Nature.

The accelerated loss of tropical rainforest is the result of destructive and familiar combination: increased global demand for commodities such as soy and cattle, and extractive national and regional policies with the explicit ambition to boost economic growth with little consideration on its environmental impact.

Soybean production has accelerated from negligible levels in 1970 to almost 1.4 million hectares in 2020, and 5 million hectares deforested since 2001 is mainly used for cattle. A similar trend can be observed for the export of beef in the last years, as well as for mining.

Between 2015 and 2021, the number of mining concessions in the country’s Amazon regions (La Paz, Beni and Pando) has increased from 88 to 341 while the mining area (cuadriculas in Spanish) have increased from 3,789 to 15,710 (+414%). According to Bolivian mining law, a cuadricula is a square of 500 meters per side, with a total surface area of 25 hectares, according to the Study Center for Labor and Agrarian Development (CEDLA). The rapid expansion of illegal gold mining in the Amazon powers one of the country’s largest export industries. As global gold prices have increased, the industry is creating massive social and environmental challenges as well as severe health threats to indigenous communities.

This expansion is fuelled in part by generous fossil-fuel subsidies, which in turn finance the growth of the soy, cattle and mineral sector. According to 2021 data from the International Monetary Fund fossil-fuel subsidies consume 6,7% of Bolivia’s GDP. In addition, illegal settlements in the lowlands feed from these larger economic changes as communities transform forests into agricultural production lands through destructive slash-and-burn techniques, which increase wildfire risks.

How to save the Amazon

Regional collaboration to protect the Amazon took a serious hit during the presidency of Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil. The announced revitalization of cooperation in the Amazon basin and surrounding forests through the Amazon Cooperation Treaty Organization offers a unique window of opportunity to end deforestation. But this opportunity will be wasted unless the following key issues are addressed.

• Pan-continental regulation: It is no secret that countries that enforce strict forest-conservation laws tend to see the most ruthless industries emigrate to less-regulated countries; experts call this phenomenon “deforestation leakage”. To protect the Amazon in Brazil, the international community therefore has every interest in ensuring that Bolivia is not forgotten. World Bank data shows that Bolivia is a perfect destination for its neighbours’ predatory sectors, with much of the state’s regulation rolled back in the past 10 years.

  To counter this, the Amazon Cooperation Treaty Organization should form a task force that directly addresses such cross-border leakage risks to protect the forests of the region, and the people who depend on them for their livelihoods. Lessons from studies of the effects of previous zero-deforestation policies] will offer useful guidance in these ambitions. Countries should ramp up their support for cross-border supply chain transparency, provide enough resources to enforce environmental legislation on the ground, and make sure indigenous rights are properly protected.

• Phasing out forest-hungry policies and industries: The case of Bolivia also highlights a general challenge that countries in the region are facing: the need to not only “scale up” green financial innovations, but also actively phase out unsustainable economic activities, harmful subsidies and policies that increase inequality.

  Don’t get us wrong: saying goodbye to industries like unchecked cattle ranching, and incentives such as fossil-fuel subsidies will take strong political will. But the world abounds with examples to draw inspiration from. Two include the Just Energy Transition Partnership that was concluded at the annual climate summit in Glasgow, COP26 and the international support to help decarbonize coal retirement in Indonesia. They show it is possible to move away from harmful industries while making sure local communities aren’t left behind.

• Cleaning up the finance industry: In today’s globalized economy, large companies often rely on capital from financial institutions to conduct their operations. The financial sector has made progress in mobilizing its influence as owners and lenders to put pressure on industries associated with deforestation risks in the Brazilian Amazon. The sector must now mobilize to help protect the enlarged Bolivian Amazon.

Cascading negative changes resulting from deforestation, such as disrupted hydrological cycles, negative health impacts, and biodiversity loss will eventually impact negatively on investments. The financial sector thus needs to support national legislation and financial regulation that shift investments away from extractive economic practices that amplify social inequalities, toward new ways of protecting forests while simultaneously promoting education, health, sanitation, employment, and other development goals. Major initiatives like the United Nations’ Principles for Responsible Investment, pension funds in the Global North, and international development banks must work closely with countries around the Amazon basin to make sure deforestation and climate ambitions are translated into action.

Bolivia’s forests, and the communities that depend on their resilience for their livelihoods, are facing a perfect deforestation storm. Swift national and international action is of the essence.

This article was co-written with Guido Meruvia Schween, a programme officer at the Swedish Embassy in La Paz, Bolivia.

Victor Galaz, Deputy Director and Associate Professor, Stockholm Resilience Centre, Stockholm University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Featured Image: Deforestation in Santa Cruz, Bolivia (2021). Photo courtesy of Overview.
https://www.over-view.com/, CC BY-NC

(The Conversation) – People once believed the planet could always accommodate us. That the resilience of the Earth system meant nature would always provide. But we now know this is not necessarily the case. As big as the world is, our impact is bigger.

In research released today, an international team of scientists from the Earth Commission, of which we were part, identified eight “safe” and “just” boundaries spanning five vital planetary systems: climate change, the biosphere, freshwater, nutrient use in fertilisers and air pollution. This is the first time an assessment of boundaries has quantified the harms to people from changes to the Earth system.

“Safe” means boundaries maintaining stability and resilience of our planetary systems on which we rely. “Just”, in this work, means boundaries which minimise significant harm to people. Together, they’re a health barometer for the planet.

Assessing our planet’s health is a big task. It took the expertise of 51 world-leading researchers from natural and social sciences. Our methods included modelling, literature reviews and expert judgement. We assessed factors such as tipping point risks, declines in Earth system functions, historical variability and effects on people.

Alarmingly, we found humanity has exceeded the safe and just limits for four of five systems. Aerosol pollution is the sole exception. Urgent action, based on the best available science, is now needed.

So, what did we find?

Our work builds on the influential concepts of planetary boundaries by finding ways to quantify what just systems look like alongside safety.

Importantly, the safe and just boundaries are defined at local to global spatial scales appropriate for assessing and managing planetary systems – as small as one square kilometre in the case of biodiversity. This is crucial because many natural functions act at local scales.

Here are the boundaries:

1. Climate boundary – keep warming to 1℃

We know the Paris Agreement goal of 1.5℃ avoids a high risk of triggering dangerous climate tipping points.

But even now, with warming at 1.2℃, many people around the world are being hit hard by climate-linked disasters, such as the recent extreme heat in China, fires in Canada, severe floods in Pakistan and droughts in the United States and the Horn of Africa.

At 1.5℃, hundreds of millions of people could be exposed to average annual temperatures over 29℃, which is outside the human climate niche and can be fatal. That means a just boundary for climate is nearer to 1°C. This makes the need to halt further carbon emissions even more urgent.

2. Biosphere boundaries: Expand intact ecosystems to cover 50-60% of the earth

A healthy biosphere ensures a safe and just planet by storing carbon, maintaining global water cycles and soil quality, protecting pollinators and many other ecosystem services. To safeguard these services, we need 50 to 60% of the world’s land to have largely intact natural ecosystems.

Recent research puts the current figure at between 45% and 50%, which includes vast areas of land with relatively low populations, including parts of Australia and the Amazon rainforest. These areas are already under pressure from climate change and other human activity.

Image by Rosina Kaiser from Pixabay

Locally, we need about 20-25% of each square kilometre of farms, towns, cities or other human-dominated landscapes to contain largely intact natural ecosystems. At present, only a third of our human-dominated landscapes meet this threshold.

3. Freshwater boundaries: Keep groundwater levels up and don’t suck rivers dry

Too much freshwater is a problem, as unprecedented floods in Australia and Pakistan show. And too little is also a problem, with unprecedented droughts taking their toll on food production.

To bring fresh water systems back into balance, a rule of thumb is to avoid taking or adding more than 20% of a river or stream’s water in any one month, in the absence of local knowledge of environmental flows.

At present, 66% of the world’s land area meets this boundary, when flows are averaged over the year. But human settlement has a major impact: less than half of the world’s population lives in these areas. Groundwater, too, is overused. At present, almost half the world’s land is subject to groundwater overextraction.

4. Fertiliser and nutrient boundaries: Halve the runoff from fertilisers

When farmers overuse fertilisers on their fields, rain washes nitrogen and phosphorus runoff into rivers and oceans. These nutrients can trigger algal blooms, damage ecosystems and worsen drinking water quality.

Yet many farming regions in poorer countries don’t have enough fertiliser, which is unjust.

Worldwide, our nitrogen and phosphorus use are up to double their safe and just boundaries. While this needs to be reduced in many countries, in other parts of the world fertiliser use can safely increase.

5. Aerosol pollution boundary: Sharply reduce dangerous air pollution and reduce regional differences

New research shows differences in concentration of aerosol pollutants between Northern and Southern hemispheres could disrupt wind patterns and monsoons if pollutant levels keep increasing. That is, air pollution could actually upend weather systems.

At present, aerosol concentrations have not yet reached weather-changing levels. But much of the world is exposed to dangerous levels of fine particle pollution (known as PM 2.5) in the air, causing an estimated 4.2 million deaths a year.

We must significantly reduce these pollutants to safer levels – under 15 micrograms per cubic metre of air.

We must act

We must urgently navigate towards a safe and just future, and strive to return our planetary systems back within safe and just boundaries through just means.

To stop human civilisation from pushing the Earths’s systems out of balance, we will have to tackle the many ways we damage the planet.

To work towards a world compatible with the Earth’s limits means setting and achieving science-based targets. To translate these boundaries to actions will require urgent support from government to create regulatory and incentive-based systems to drive the changes needed.

Setting boundaries and targets is vital. The Paris Agreement galvanised faster action on climate. But we need similar boundaries to ensure the future holds fresh water, clean air, a planet still full of life and a good life for humans.

We would like to acknowledge support from the Earth Commission, which is hosted by Future Earth, and is the science component of the Global Commons Alliance

Steven J Lade, Resilience researcher at Australian National University, Australian National University; Ben Stewart-Koster, Senior research fellow, Griffith University; Stuart Bunn, Professor, Australian Rivers Institute, Griffith University; Syezlin Hasan, Research fellow, Griffith University, and Xuemei Bai, Distinguished Professor, Australian National University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Brazil’s president-elect, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, was greeted with applause and cheers when he addressed the U.N. climate conference in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt, on Nov. 16, 2022. As he had in his campaign, Lula pledged to stop rampant deforestation in the Amazon, which his predecessor, Jair Bolsanaro, had encouraged.

Forests play a critical role in slowing climate change by taking up carbon dioxide, and the Amazon rainforest absorbs one-fourth of the CO2 absorbed by all the land on Earth. These articles from The Conversation’s archive examine stresses on the Amazon and the Indigenous groups who live there.

1. Massive losses

The Amazon rainforest is vast, covering some 2.3 million square miles (6 million square kilometers). It extends over eight countries, with about 60% of it in Brazil. And the destruction occurring there is also enormous.

From 2010 to 2019, the Amazon lost 24,000 square miles (62,000 square kilometers) of forest – the equivalent of about 10.3 million U.S. football fields. Much of this land was turned into cattle ranches, farms and palm oil plantations.

“There are a number of reasons why this deforestation matters – financial, environmental and social,” wrote Washington University in St. Louis data scientist Liberty Vittert, explaining why she and other judges chose Amazon deforestation as the Royal Statistical Society’s International Statistic of the Decade.

Forest clearance in the region threatens people, wild species and freshwater supplies along with the climate. “The farmers, commercial interest groups and others looking for cheap land all have a clear vested interest in deforestation going ahead, but any possible short-term gain is clearly outweighed by long-term loss,” Vittert concluded.

2. Legalizing land grabs

Much of the Amazon has been under state control for decades. In the 1970s, Brazil’s military government started encouraging farmers and miners to move into the region to spur economic development, while also setting some zones aside for conservation. More recently, however, Brazil’s government has made it easier for wealthy interests to seize large swaths of land – including in conservation areas and Indigenous territories.

Reviewing national laws and land holdings, University of Florida geographers Gabriel Cardoso Carrero, Cynthia S. Simmons and Robert T. Walker found that Brazil’s National Congress was expanding the legal size of private holdings in the Amazon even before Bolsonaro was elected in 2019.

In southern Amazonas state, Amazonia’s most active deforestation frontier, rates of deforestation started to rise in 2012 because of loosened regulatory oversight. The number and size of clearings that the researchers identified using satellite data increased after Bolsonaro took office.

“Because of policy interventions and the greening of agricultural supply chains, deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon fell after 2005, reaching a low point in 2012, when it began trending up again because of weakening environmental governance and reduced surveillance,” they observed. “In our view, the global community can help by insisting that supply chains for Amazonian beef and soybean products originate on lands deforested long ago and whose legality is long-standing.”

The Guardian: “How the Amazon has started to heat the planet | It’s Complicated”

3. Indigenous resistance

Road building in the Amazon, which increased dramatically during Bolsonaro’s tenure, brings development and related threats like wildfires into wild areas. University of Richmond geographer David Salisbury also saw it as an existential threat to Indigenous communities.

Indigenous residents of the Brazilian-Peruvian borderlands where Salisbury worked “understand that the loggers and their tractors and chainsaws are the sharp point of a road allowing coca growers, land traffickers and others access to traditional Indigenous territories and resources,” Salisbury reported. “They also realize that their Indigenous communities may be all that stands in defense of the forest and stops invaders and road builders.”

Several Indigenous women won office as federal deputies in Brazil’s recent elections, and Lula has pledged to protect Indigenous people’s rights. Salisbury saw it as crucial to ensure that Indigenous defenders of the Amazon receive “the support and educational opportunities needed to be safe, prosperous and empowered to protect their rainforest home.”

4. Five global deforestation drivers: Beef, soy, palm oil, wood – and crime

A small handful of highly lucrative commodities are the main causes of deforestation in the Amazon and other tropical regions around the world. In Brazil, much of the land is cleared for raising beef cattle or cultivating soy. In Indonesia and Malaysia, palm oil production is spurring large-scale rainforest destruction. Wood production, for pulp and paper products as well as fuel, is also a major driver in Asia and Africa.

“Making the supply chains for these four commodities more sustainable is an important strategy for reducing deforestation,” wrote Texas State University geographer Jennifer Devine. But Devine also found a fifth factor interwoven with these four industries: organized crime.

“Large, lucrative industries offer opportunities to move and launder money; as a result, in many parts of the world, deforestation is driven by the drug trade,” she reported. In the Amazon, for example, drug traffickers are illegally logging forests and hiding cocaine in timber shipments to Europe.

“Promoting sustainable production and consumption are critical to halting deforestation worldwide. But in my view, national and industry leaders also have to root organized crime and illicit markets out of these commodity chains,” Devine concluded.

Editor’s note: This story is a roundup of articles from The Conversation’s archive.

Jennifer Weeks, Senior Environment + Energy Editor, The Conversation

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

In his speech, Lula recognized that the conference’s invitation to him to speak even before his inauguration was an “acknowledgment that the world is in a hurry to see Brazil participating again in discussions about the future of the planet and all the beings that inhabit it — the planet that always warns us that we need each other to survive — that alone we are vulnerable to the climate tragedy.”

Lula’s life has been one of fighting for the collective good, whereas Bolsonaro had been about individual greed and selfishness, and the devil take the hindmost.

The president-elect of the world’s ninth-largest economy by nominal GDP lamented, “We spend trillions of dollars on wars that only bring destruction and death, while 900 million people around the world have nothing to eat. We are living in a time of multiple crises – growing geopolitical tensions, the return of the risk of nuclear war, food and energy supply crisis, erosion of biodiversity, intolerable increase in inequality.”

He said that what was needed to reverse the acceleration of global heating was better “leadership,” in achieving the goals set in climate agreements already concluded. He pointed out that the world’s poorer nations need help from the wealthy ones in addressing climate change, and noted that the wealthy nations were primarily responsible for the planet’s surfeit of CO2, but the poorer nations are most vulnerable to the resulting climate disruptions.

Some environmentalists have urged the countries with advanced economies to simply pay Brazil to maintain and restore the Amazon rainforest for its carbon-absorbing role (20% of this capacity has been lost in the past 50 years). Now would be the time to follow through on such a plan, which Lula is signalling he would welcome.

Lula lauded the recent election in Brazil, won by the Left, on the grounds that it would “help contain the advance of the authoritarian and undemocratic extreme right and of climate denialism in the world.” He added, “And also because not only the peace and well-being of the Brazilian people, but also the survival of the Amazon and, therefore, of our planet all depended on the results of the election in Brazil.”

Lula correctly links authoritarianism and the far Right to climate denialism, and ties his social democratic Workers Party to democracy, social peace, and climate activism. This entwining of environmentalism with the traditional Leftist emphasis on workers’ well-being marks an interesting ideological development that other social democratic thinkers should attend to. After all, workers’ lives cannot improve if their living conditions are degraded by mega-storms, floods, sea-level rise and drought.

Lula pointed to his own past record of achievement on the Amazon issue, saying, “Brazil has already shown the world the way to defeat deforestation and global warming. Between 2004 and 2012, we reduced the devastation rate of the Amazon by 83%, while the agricultural GDP grew 75%.”

I wrote at the end of 2020 about what happened after Lula left the presidency:

“The Amazon rainforest continues to burn down, another effect of global heating caused by humans driving gasoline cars and burning coal and gas for heating and electricity. The far right Bolsonaro government is also actively encouraging the clearing of the forest for agriculture and cattle ranching. The BBC reported deforestation surging to a 12-year high. A total of 11,088 sq km (4,281 sq miles) of rainforest were destroyed from August 2019 to July 2020. Brazilian scientists have discovered that some non-rainforest forests (deciduous etc.) in Minas Gerais state have become net emitters of carbon dioxide instead of being carbon sinks. This ultimately could happen to the Amazon rainforest. This development would be an enormous catastrophe for each of us. The Amazon rainforest absorbs 2 billion tons of carbon dioxide every year. That is five percent of all annual CO2 emissions around the world.”

Lula also slammed the recent years of Bolsonaro’s right-wing dominance of Brazilian politics: “Unfortunately, since 2019, Brazil has faced a government that was disastrous in every way – regarding the fight against unemployment and inequality, regarding the fight against poverty and hunger — and in its disregard for a pandemic that killed 700,000 Brazilians, in its disrespect for human rights, in its foreign policy that isolated the country from the rest of the world, and also in its devastation of the environment.”

He pledged that his Brazil would cooperate with the developing countries, in Africa, Latin America and the Caribbean, with investments and technology transfer.

He pledged to reunite Brazil itself, the world’s 7th largest country by population, after what he characterized as profound polarization provoked by “fake news and hate speech.”

He also, however, wanted to reform global governance, seeking a seat on the UN Security Council and an end to the Great-Power veto on that body.

Lula is aware of the extreme importance of the Amazon rain forest as a carbon sink for the whole world. He observed, “Ladies and gentlemen, there is no climate security for the world without a protected Amazon. We will not spare any effort to achieve zero deforestation and degradation of our ecosystems (biomas) by 2030, in the same way that more than 130 countries committed themselves by signing the Glasgow Declaration of Leaders on Forests.”

He continued, “For this reason, I want to take advantage of this Conference to announce that the fight against climate change will have the highest profile in my government. Let us prioritize the fight against deforestation in all our biomes. In the first three years of the current government, deforestation in the Amazon increased by 73%. In 2021 alone, 13,000 square kilometers were deforested. This devastation will be in the past. Environmental crimes, which grew in a frightening way during the government that is coming to an end, will now be fought without a truce.”

Lula’s pledges should be music to the world’s ears. But note that Bolsonaro’s political allies are powerful in the parliament still, and the new president could be blocked in some of his hoped-for initiatives. If the advanced economies want the benefit of the Amazon rain forest in the fight against the climate emergency, they need to support Lula’s new government with substantial monetary grants and investments.

The reason I say that da Silva’s victory is a win for the planet is that the fate of the Amazon rain forest hangs in the balance. Bolsonaro, was determined to destroy it by turning it into big agricultural estates, mines and other endeavors of barracuda capitalism. The Amazon and other rain forests are major carbon sinks, sucking carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. But rain forests can be flipped by deforestation and wildfires, so that they end up emitting far more carbon than they absorb. With its extent reduced by 20% in the past 50 years, the Amazon is teetering on that precipice, and some environmentalists fear it may have fallen off the edge already. Certainly, a few more years of Bolsonaro’s depredations would spell doom for the rain forest and would exacerbate the climate crisis.

The issue is wrought up not only with planetary ecology but with a vicious class and ethnic struggle inside Brazil. The people who live with the Amazon and make use of its resources without destroying them are largely indigenous Brazilians. There are about a million of them, comprising 305 tribes.

Survival International explains, “The government has recognized 690 territories for its indigenous population, covering about 13% of Brazil’s land mass. Nearly all of this reserved land (98.5%) lies in the Amazon.”

Bolsonaro, a notorious racist, lamented that land had been reserved for “Indios,” as they are called in Portuguese. He saw the latter as uncivilized barbarians who had unfairly blocked the mining of tin, gold and other minerals in the river basin and who stood in the way of the expansion of the estates of militant Brazilian ranchers. He promised, “In 2019 we’re going to rip up Raposa Serra do Sol [Indigenous Territory in Roraima, northern Brazil]. We’re going to give all the ranchers guns.”

Bolsonaro’s racism combined with his capitalist rapaciousness and his desire for political backing from ranchers and mining concerns to make exploiting the Amazon a top priority. Just in the first two months of this year, space photography showed that 166 square miles of the rain forest was cleared. In the previous decade the average amount of land cleared in any two-month period was less than half that. Bolsonaro’s policies were accelerating the clearing.

In contrast, Lula wrote an op-ed for the French newspaper Le Monde this weekend in which he said, “Today, the urgency of climate, mounting inequalities and geopolitical tensions reveal the gravity of the crisis that affects our planet. Unfortunately, Jair Bolsonaro continues to aggravate this situation in embracing climate change denialism and attacking the institutions of our democracy, and in promoting intolerance. These characteristics of his government have made Brazil a new pariah on the international scene. This cannot go on.”

Reuters Brazil reports in Portuguese that Celso Amorim, the principal foreign policy advisor to Lula, told the wire service, “If elected, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva should propose the holding of a summit of nations of the Amazon rainforest in the first half of 2023, to which developed countries interested in its conservation would also be invited.”

Reuters concluded from Amorim’s remarks that the “global repositioning of Brazil on the issue of the environment and the climate crisis will be a priority of the foreign affairs agenda in a possible new Lula government, in a context in which deforestation of the Amazon is at the highest level in 15 years.”

Since the Amazon is a regional, hemispheric and global issue, the international community needs to support Lula’s efforts. There needs to be substantial reforestation and attention to repairing its health and to protecting it from the wild fires (also caused by global heating) that have piled on human clearing efforts to reduce its extent.

Continued greenhouse gas emissions risk triggering climate tipping points. These are self-sustaining shifts in the climate system that would lock-in devastating changes, like sea-level rise, even if all emissions ended.

The first major assessment in 2008 identified nine parts of the climate system that are sensitive to tipping, including ice sheets, ocean currents and major forests. Since then, huge advances in climate modelling and a flood of new observations and records of ancient climate change have given scientists a far better picture of these tipping elements. Extra ones have also been proposed, like permafrost around the Arctic (permanently frozen ground that could unleash more carbon if thawed).

Estimates of the warming levels at which these elements could tip have fallen since 2008. The collapse of the west Antarctic ice sheet was once thought to be a risk when warming reached 3°C-5°C above Earth’s pre-industrial average temperature. Now it’s thought to be possible at current warming levels.

In our new assessment of the past 15 years of research, myself and colleagues found that we can’t rule out five tipping points being triggered right now when global warming stands at roughly 1.2°C. Four of these five become more likely as global warming exceeds 1.5°C.

These are sobering conclusions. Not all of the news coverage captured the nuance of our study, though. So here’s what our findings actually mean.

Uncertain thresholds

We synthesised the results of more than 200 studies to estimate warming thresholds for each tipping element. The best estimate was either one that multiple studies converged on or which a study judged to be particularly reliable reported. For example, records of when ice sheets had retreated in the past and modelling studies indicate the Greenland ice sheet is likely to collapse beyond 1.5°C. We also estimated the minimum and maximum thresholds at which collapse is possible: model estimates for Greenland range between 0.8°C and 3.0°C.

Within this range, tipping becomes more likely as warming increases. We defined tipping as possible (but not yet likely) when warming is above the minimum but below the best estimate, and likely above the best estimate. We also judged how confident we are with each estimate. For example, we are more confident in our estimates for Greenland’s ice sheet collapse than those for abrupt permafrost thaw.

This uncertainty means that we do not expect four climate tipping points to be triggered the first year global temperatures reach 1.5°C (which climate scientists suggest is possible in the next five years), or even when temperatures averaged over several years reach 1.5°C sometime in the next couple of decades. Instead, every fraction of a degree makes tipping more likely, but we can’t be sure exactly when tipping becomes inevitable.

This is especially true for the Greenland and west Antarctic ice sheets. While our assessment suggests their collapse becomes likely beyond 1.5°C, ice sheets are so massive that they change very slowly. Collapse would take thousands of years, and the processes driving it require warming to remain beyond the threshold for several decades. If warming returned below the threshold before tipping kicked in, it may be possible for ice sheets to temporarily overshoot their thresholds without collapsing.

For some other tipping points, change is likely to be more dispersed. We estimate that both tropical coral reef death and abrupt permafrost thaw are possible at the current warming level. But thresholds vary between reefs and patches of permafrost. Both are already happening in some places, but in our assessment, these changes become much more widespread at a similar time beyond 1.5°C.

Elsewhere, small patches of the Amazon and northern forests might tip and transition to a savannah-like state first, bypassing a more catastrophic dieback across the whole forest. Model results that are yet to be published suggest that Amazon tipping might occur in several regions at varying warming levels rather than as one big event.

There may also be no well-defined threshold for some tipping elements. Ancient climate records suggest ocean currents in the North Atlantic can dramatically flip from being strong, as they are now, to weak as a result of both warming and melting freshwater from Greenland disrupting circulation. Recent modelling suggests that the threshold for the collapse of Atlantic circulation depends on how fast warming increases alongside other hard-to-measure factors, making it highly uncertain.

Into the danger zone

There are signs that some tipping points are already approaching. Degradation and drought have caused parts of the Amazon to become less resilient to disturbances like fire and emit more carbon than they absorb.

The front edge of some retreating west Antarctic glaciers are only kilometres away from the unstoppable retreat. Early warning signals in climate monitoring data (such as bigger and longer swings in how much glaciers melt each year) suggest that parts of the Greenland ice sheet and Atlantic circulation are also destabilising.

These signals can’t tell us exactly how close we are to tipping points, only that destabilisation is underway and a tipping point may be approaching. The most we can be sure of is that every fraction of further warming will destabilise these tipping elements more and make the initiation of self-sustaining changes more likely.

This strengthens the case for ambitious emissions cuts in line with the Paris agreement’s aim of halting warming at 1.5°C. This would reduce the chances of triggering multiple climate tipping points – even if we can’t rule out some being reached soon.

Don’t have time to read about climate change as much as you’d like?

Get a weekly roundup in your inbox instead. Every Wednesday, The Conversation’s environment editor writes Imagine, a short email that goes a little deeper into just one climate issue. Join the 10,000+ readers who’ve subscribed so far.

David Armstrong McKay, Researcher in Earth System Resilience, Stockholm University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

“The report warns that The number and duration of droughts has increased by 29 percent since 2000, as compared to the two previous decades (WMO, 2021).”

The powerful impact of these changes is not something distant: “The World Bank estimates that up to 216 million people could be forced to migrate by 2050, largely due to drought, together with other factors such as water scarcity, declining crop productivity, sea-level rise and overpopulation (The World Bank, 2021).” The Commission adds, “Within the next few decades, 129 countries will experience an increase in drought exposure mainly due to climate, change alone – 23 primarily due to population growth and 38 mostly due to the interaction between climate change and population growth (Smirnov, O. et al., 2016).”

216 million people is two thirds of the population of the United States. That’s the scale of the refugee problem looming. The four or five million Ukrainian refugees present difficulties for the host countries, but this is a problem 40 times greater over just the next 30 years.

It isn’t as though water stress was a minor problem in the 20th century, which saw global temperatures rise by about 1 degree Celsius, but it is rapidly accelerating in the 21st as humanity burns more and more coal, petroleum and methane gas. Driving gasoline cars is killing children as it releases carbon dioxide, a heat-trapping gas that is heating up the globe. In the past century, over 10 million people died of drought events, which cost $100 billion in economic losses.

The report says, “From 1970 to 2019, drought was one of the hazards that led to the largest human losses, with a total of approximately 650,000 deaths.” That toll will now increase dramatically.

Already, about a third of humanity, 2.3 billion people, face “water stress.” But the problem has gotten worse by 29% already in this century and will continue to worsen, since our carbon dioxide emissions have continued to be in the tens of billions of tons a year.

By 2040, UNICEF estimates that 1 in 4 children will be living in areas with extreme water shortages, and that every country in the world is at risk.

These dangers can be combated. The report says, ” Land restoration is cost-effective: In Niger, farmers have substantially reduced drought risks by creating new agroforestry systems on 5 million hectares over 20 years, with average costs below USD20 per hectare (WRI, 2017)”

But the authors admit that the most effective measure to avoid more disasters is to limit global heating to a 3.6 degrees F. (1.5C) increase over the pre-industrial average. That goal is rapidly slipping away as governments dilly dally. The climate emergency is much more dangerous than COVID-19, by orders or magnitude, but we have seen governments take none of the drastic steps regarding it that they did to fight the pandemic.

They note that 24 countries have faced drought emergencies in just the past two years, including the United States and Australia.

We are creating a negative feedback loop. The report points out, “One-third of global carbon dioxide emissions is offset by the carbon uptake of terrestrial ecosystems, yet their capacity to sequester carbon is highly sensitive to drought events.” If rain forests are tipped over into being producers of carbon dioxide rather than carbon sinks, then it will cause global heating to speed up and get worse. This fate increasingly threatens the Amazon River basin.

Animals are threatened as well as plants. In Australia in 2019-2020, massive wildfires killed 3 billion animals.

Finally, the Commission issues a stern warning about our fossil-fuel addictions for anyone in Europe who thinks this is an African or Asian problem, observing, “If global warming reaches 3 degrees Celsius by 2100, as has been predicted, drought losses could be five times higher than they are today, with the largest increase in drought losses projected in the Mediterranean and the Atlantic regions of Europe.”

Plants that inhabit the Earth have the incredible ability to grow continually for hundreds of years, and always towards the light of the sun, which provides them with the necessary energy to sprout.

At the source of this growth are changes in their environment, such as variations in light, temperature and humidity. But new stimuli from current climate changes are disrupting the normal growth of plants.

As a doctoral candidate in biochemistry at the University of Québec in Montréal, I am interested in the structure of plant proteins, and study the ways plants adapt to environmental stresses (drought, cold, deficiencies) at the molecular level in order to select more resilient variants for agriculture.

The unmatched longevity of Pando

The oldest forest on the planet, called Pando, is 80,000 years old. Located in Utah it contains 40,000 genetically identical (clones) of quaking, or trembling, aspen trees. The colony communicates via a single root network.

Pando is considered to be the oldest living organism in the world. This colony originated 30,000 years before the first Homo sapiens settled in Europe. Pando, therefore, has borne witness to the totality of modern human life: the empires of China and Rome, world wars and also to humanity’s greatest feats.

Nonetheless, the colony’s poplars have not grown nonstop for 80,000 years. On the one hand, their development is orchestrated by the seasons. On the other hand, they must control their developmental growth according to their needs and physical capacities to face external aggressions. By disrupting external environmental stimuli, the current climate crisis directly affects this normal growth regulation.

The secret of plant growth is buried in the cell

Plants form new organs such as leaves, flowers or roots, as needed to respond to an external stimulus from the environment. For example, a change in the light exposure period during spring triggers flowering.

These stimuli target the DNA by activating specific genes for the development of each organ to form an adult plant. DNA is comparable to a dictionary of genes that contains the code for the physical peculiarities of the plant. These genes are the living words that must be read to express their meaning, and the information they contain.

From seed germination to flower reproduction and the formation of stems, roots and leaves, all the stages of plant development and growth are due to a gene reading phenomenon. To read the genes, specific activators are needed for each of the words. If the environmental conditions change and are conducive to growth, then these activators position themselves at the front of the gene to read and express it, and lead to the specific growth of the organ encoded by the gene.

DELLA proteins determine growth

Plants cannot afford to grow indefinitely because of the energy costs of growth. In addition, similar to animals that hibernate, plants stop growing during the winter, becoming dormant to survive the season. To do this, plants block the reading of genes thanks to safeguards called DELLA proteins.

Found only in plants, these proteins have been constant throughout evolution. They are found particularly in mosses, ferns, conifers and flowering plants. DELLAs are located in the cell nucleus, closest to DNA. They are produced continually and can block gene activators.

To mature, plants must destroy the DELLAs to release the activators. Plants have developed a system for labelling these proteins to influence their destiny in the cell according to their needs. To degrade DELLAs, the cell adds a small protein, called ubiquitin, to its surface. Ubiquitin acts like a postage stamp that tells the cell to deliver the DELLAs to a new destination, a “cellular trash can,” where they will be degraded.

Climate stress blocks DELLA degradation

Floods or droughts are increasing all over the planet. Because of their immobility, plants cannot flee from these external attacks. These new environmental parameters stress wild plants and agricultural crops by disrupting their growth, meaning they must save their energy to survive rather than grow, and must not degrade the DELLA proteins.

This requires the DELLA proteins to be labelled in another way, through a cousin of ubiquitin, which scientists have named SUMO. SUMO replaces ubiquitin, and serves as a life buoy so that it does not get degraded.

In fact, SUMO labelling is done in the exact same place where ubiquitin should be added. The presence of SUMO no longer makes it possible to add ubiquitin, which allows plants to survive adverse climatic events.

In the current climate crisis, it is important to investigate and understand this plant growth mechanism in the hope of maintaining sustainability in agricultural crops. Researchers are actively working to isolate or select plants capable of rapidly activating SUMO in order to grow under adverse environmental conditions.

Souleïmen Jmii, Ph.D Biologie structurale / Biochimie végétale, Université du Québec à Montréal (UQAM)

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

From rainforests to savannas, ecosystems on land absorb almost 30% of the carbon dioxide human activities release into the atmosphere. These ecosystems are critical to stop the planet warming beyond 1.5℃ this century – but climate change may be weakening their capacity to offset global emissions.

This is a key issue that OzFlux, a research network from Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand, has been investigating for the past 20 years. Over this time, we’ve identified which ecosystems absorb the most carbon, and have been learning how they respond to extreme weather and climate events such as drought, floods and bushfires.

The biggest absorbers of atmospheric carbon dioxide in Australia are savannas and temperate forests. But as the effects of climate change intensify, ecosystems such as these are at risk of reaching tipping points of collapse.

In our latest research paper, we look back at the two decades of OzFlux’s findings. So far, the ecosystems we studied are showing resilience by rapidly pivoting back to being carbon sinks after a disturbance. This can be seen, for example, in leaves growing back on trees soon after bushfire.

But how long will this resilience remain? As climate change pressures intensify, evidence suggests carbon sinks may lose their ability to bounce back from climate-related disasters. This reveals vital gaps in our knowledge.

Australian ecosystems absorb 150 million tonnes of carbon each year

Between 2011 and 2020, land-based ecosystems sequestered 11.2 billion tonnes (29%) of global CO₂ emissions. To put this into perspective, that’s roughly similar to the amount China emitted in 2021.

OzFlux has enabled the first comprehensive assessment of Australia’s carbon budget from 1990 to 2011. This found Australia’s land-based ecosystems accumulate some 150 million tonnes of CO₂ each year on average – helping to offset national fossil fuel emissions by around one third.

For example, every hectare of Australia’s temperate forests absorbs 3.9 tonnes of carbon in a year, according to OzFlux data. Likewise, every hectare of Australia’s savanna absorbs 3.4 tonnes of carbon. This is about 100 times larger than a hectare of Mediterranean woodland or shrubland.

But it’s important to note that the amount of carbon Australian ecosystems can sequester fluctuates widely from one year to the next. This is due to, for instance, the natural climate variability (such as in La Niña or El Niño years), and disturbances (such as fire and land use changes).

In any case, it’s clear these ecosystems will play an important role in Australia reaching its target of net-zero emissions by 2050. But how effective will they continue to be as the climate changes?

How climate change weakens these carbon sinks

Extreme climate variability – flooding rains, droughts and heatwaves – along with bushfires and land clearing, can weaken these carbon sinks.

While many Australian ecosystems show resilience to these stresses, we found their recovery time may be shortening due to more frequent and extreme events, potentially compromising their long-term contribution towards offsetting emissions.

Take bushfire as an example. When it burns a forest, the carbon stored in the plants is released back into the atmosphere as smoke – so the ecosystem becomes a carbon source. Likewise, under drought or heatwave conditions, water available to the roots becomes depleted and limits photosynthesis, which can tip a forest’s carbon budget from being a sink to a carbon source.

If that drought or heatwave endures for a long time, or a bushfire returns before the forest has recovered, its ability to regain its carbon sink status is at risk.

Learning how carbon sinks may shift in Australia and New Zealand can have a global impact. Both countries are home to a broad range of climates – from the wet tropics, to the Mediterranean climate of southwest Australia, to the temperate climate in the southeast.

Our unique ecosystems have evolved to suit these diverse climates, which are underrepresented in the global network.

This means long-term ecosystem observatories – OzFlux, along with the Terrestrial Ecosystem Research Network – provide a vital natural laboratory for understanding ecosystems in this era of accelerating climate change.

Over its 20 years, OzFlux has made crucial contributions to the international understanding of climate change. A few of its major findings include:

• the 2011 La Niña event led to a greening of interior Australia, with ecosystems flourishing from increased water availability

• heatwaves can negate the carbon sink strength of our ecosystems, and even lead to carbon emissions from plants

• land clearing and the draining of peatland systems add to Australia’s and New Zealand’s greenhouse gas emissions

Critical questions remain

Plans in Australia and New Zealand to reach net zero emissions by 2050 strongly depend on the ongoing ability for ecosystems to sequester emissions from industry, agriculture, transport and the electricity sectors.

While some management and technological innovations are underway to address this, such as in the agricultural sector, we need long-term measurements of carbon cycling to truly understand the limits of ecosystems and their risk of collapse.

Indeed, we’re already in uncharted territory under climate change. Weather extremes from heatwaves to heavy rainfall are becoming more frequent and intense. And CO₂ levels are more than 50% higher than they were 200 years ago.

So while our ecosystems have remained a net sink over the last 20 years, it’s worth asking:

• will they continue to do the heavy-lifting required to keep both countries on track to meet their climate targets?

• how do we protect, restore and sustain the most vital, yet vulnerable, ecosystems, such as “coastal blue carbon” (including seagrasses and mangroves)? These are critical to nature-based solutions to climate change

• how do we monitor and verify national carbon accounting schemes, such as Australia’s Emissions Reduction Fund?

Critical questions remain about how well Australia’s and New Zealand’s ecosystems can continue storing CO₂.

Caitlin Moore, Research Fellow, The University of Western Australia; David Campbell, Associate Professor, University of Waikato; Helen Cleugh, Honorary Professor, Australian National University; Jamie Cleverly, Snr research fellow in environmental sciences, James Cook University; Jason Beringer, Professor, The University of Western Australia; Lindsay Hutley, Professor of Environmental Science, Charles Darwin University, and Mark Grant, Science Communication and Engagement Manager; Program Coordinator, The University of Queensland

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.