Amazon deforestation accelerating to unrecoverable 'tipping point'

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/jul/25/amazonian-rainforest-near-unrecoverable-tipping-point

by sandino • 7 years ago

131 63 7 years ago

tracker12• 7 years ago

How much money is made from the farmland from deforested regions... how much from the lumber and how much from the reuse of the land? How many countries are trading with Brazil for consuming those goods?

It's a big problem, but without some input from trade partners globally and/or other support, I'm not sure what the solution really is. Also, not just in Brazil, but other areas with grasslands that have seen desertification, countering that is very important. It may be necessary to support global efforts to increase diverse planting to portions of agricultural lands to at least try to preserve them. Grazing and crop rotations as well.

Efforts for more diverse use of agriculture as well. More barley and buckwheat, less soy and corn. Less monoculture in the crops, seed varieties of crops we already grow to increase diversity in agriculture. Of course, moving away from Monsonto controlled models, which should mean reverting policy on patents regarding genetic markers and traits.

Right now, too much of the food supply is from mega farms with no diversity and lots of chemical pesticides and resistant strains of crops that are killing off bee populations. I'm not so much against GMO crops as a practice, but definitely need some genetic diversity in the practice. We have the ability to feed the world, we need to start concentrating on doing it better.

heduduhdjjd• 7 years ago

The only real solution will be for wealthy nations paying Brazil to not exploit their natural resources, which seems like a very very high ask for all parties involved.

Otherwise we'll see the continued destruction for at least another 30-40 years until there's a global demographic peak.

We're also going to see the destruction of the Canadian Boreal forest as temperatures rise makes such land viable for industrial farming.

blablabla123• 7 years ago

I wonder if there are any NGOs one could reasonably give money for that.

Most countries just don't have a rainforest although it's in interest of most to maintain the existing ones.

bgorman• 7 years ago

You can donate to charities that directly purchase rainforest. Rainforesttrust.org is one. They can purchase an acre of land for around 10 dollars.

Right now the main issue is that last year they only received 15 million in donations. Not nearly enough to stop the problem.

eloff• 7 years ago

No, the Canadian forest would basically reclaim as much land from the tundra where it's currently to cold for trees as it would lose to agriculture. I expect it to be more or less a wash. Also the same goes for Russia's boreal forests.

yonaguska• 7 years ago

why not just sanction or tariff beef exports? Seems like a simpler solution.

switchbak• 7 years ago

Canada (and the Boreal in particular)is absolutely huge. I'm not convinced that much of this land is any more economically viable than the copious amounts of "undeveloped" wilderness to the south.

Plus, climate change is also about variability. Much of this land could see wild extremes of weather, sounds risky for agriculture.

terlisimo3• 7 years ago

"The planet is fine."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uHgJKrmbYfg

hanwenn• 7 years ago

The money is not made on the lumber, but on agriculture.

I recently read that, most of the deforested regions are used for low-density cattle (0.5 cow / hectare), which gets transformed into beef, mainly for export.

vitorbaptistaa• 7 years ago

This is the main reason I became a vegetarian.

tracker12• 7 years ago

Which is sad, because you don't need deep deforestation to introduce grassland for grazing. Also, I'm consistently curious why other grassland ruminants aren't more popularized, some of which imho taste better.

As to another comment on going vegan, it's just not an option for me... that doesn't mean I don't want more responsible means of farming.

rodolphoarruda2• 7 years ago

As a Brazilian, I'm trying to imagine the logistical costs of running any type of large scale export oriented agriculture business in the Amazon. There is no railroad, no paved roads, no electricity, no workforce (human density is lower than 1 per square Km, let alone work aged humans), nothing. There's a lot of dense forest and water. Feeding cattle in large scale must be a huge expensive challenge in the Amazon region. Processing meat and moving it to ports, an insanely expensive work due to the lack of basic infrastructure. On the flip side, there are other regions in the country with at least 3 decades of accumulated expertise in animal protein production for the international market, good infrastructure, including proximity to sea ports. I don't see how a serious globally competitive animal protein group could make the decision to run business in such an isolated infra deprived area. It would be like someone from the Silicon Valley deciding to run a tech business in Antarctica for the sole reason the datacenter could be kept cooler at a lower cost using what nature has to offer in abundance in that region: cold weather. Amazon offers cheap land and water (period), but that is not enough to make a profitable animal protein business.

chewz• 7 years ago

Less monoculture in the crops, seed varieties of crops we already grow to increase diversity in agriculture.

Less people on planet Earth consuming like there is no tommorow

makerofspoons• 7 years ago

Loss of the Amazon would be a major tipping point in ecological collapse: https://www.nationalgeographic.com/environment/2018/11/how-c...

In one model if the Amazon were deforested the snowpack in the Sierra Nevada mountains declines by half. There are global impacts for all of this.

woogiewonka2• 7 years ago

No sources, but something tells me we are already past the tipping point.

digitalsushi• 7 years ago

A morbid thought I've been struggling with a lot lately.

As we continue to pass point of no return scenarios, will there be an increasing collective of people that flip to believing there is no hope, and adopting a congruent lifestyle?

Could an increasing collective of people sharing this narrative, that we've entered the palliative era of humanity, be the last factor for our ultimate failure as we navigate this tricky problem of scaling our species for a planet?

Does the process of giving up, on the individual level, accelerate a 'bank run' scenario on the planet?

I devote a small minority of my constant focus to remaining calm and trying to not give in, and I am increasingly fatigued and tempted to join the much easier position that it's already too late. But I don't want to see who I turn into once I adopt that position.

gtirloni2• 7 years ago

Until we find an economic solution, this trend will just continue. Unfortunately, people only want to profit at all costs and governments usually want to be enablers of that, so the economy grows and they can have more votes in the next election.

I think the real question is: can equivalent money to logging/beef be made from tropical forests? If we can come up with an answer to that, maybe we can revert this trend.

baxtr• 7 years ago

Stop eating meat could be one of answers.

terlisimo3• 7 years ago

So is "stop having more than 2 children".

Another one is "stop buying things you don't really need".

But yeah, good luck convincing people to get behind that.

avip• 7 years ago

Is this the question? Could rainforests produce enough "economic value" to justify their existence?

gdubs2• 7 years ago

If carbon was priced to reflect its negative externalities the Amazon [Rain Forest] wouldn’t have to generate money because clearing it for agriculture would be prohibitively expensive.

rlpb• 7 years ago

Perhaps the rest of the world should be sending money to the rainforest areas to represent the value to the world climate that they provide.

riffraff2• 7 years ago

I'd imagine people wouldn't really pay for a permit to cut trees, the forest would just accidentally get burned or something like that.

If we'd make it not economically useful to burn it down, because agricultural products were less profitable, that would work, probably.

vfc12• 7 years ago

Cattle ranching in the Amazon is the main responsible for deforestation, responsible for about 65% of the land deforested.

So a simple economic solution to the problem is to stop buying so much beef and the deforestation would reduce drastically. Why would they continue to chop the forest down if they have no economic incentive to do so?

The excessive consumption of animal products in the west is the main reason why this "3 football fields" a minute thing is going on.

maehwasu• 7 years ago

What incentive mechanism are you proposing? (Real question, not rhetorical)

Generally, when people ask for an economic solution, they’re looking for a proposal to change behavioral incentives, rather than proclamation of the desirability of someone’s pet cause (as noble as it may be).

Kaibeezy• 7 years ago

I’m interested in this but not knowledgeable.

What is a “tipping point” in this context? The article doesn’t say.

How does the overall size of a forest affect its ability to re-expand? Wouldn’t this happen at the edges once those are no longer maintained, regardless of the overall size?

Does “unrecoverable” mean “via natural processes”? Wouldn’t it be possible for human intervention to reforest?

Thx.

dharma1• 7 years ago

https://youtu.be/TigV80hwebg

makeitrein2• 7 years ago

This made me feel sad - what's a good charity to donate $500 to?

overcast• 7 years ago

As mentioned above, https://www.rainforesttrust.org/ seems to be a good one.

makeitrein2• 7 years ago

Cool, just donated some benjamins - https://imgur.com/a/ZOuZMXA

z3t4• 7 years ago

I remember in the 90's there was a drive to buy Amazon forest to prevent deforestatio. A lot of people bought (i didnt). I wonder if it still stands or if it was a scam.

holoduke• 7 years ago

Completely off topic, but it took me more than 2 minutes and more than just one comment before I understood the word Amazon correctly. I though about some Jeff bezos announcement about deforestation.

beefcake• 7 years ago

Hopefully this creates a lot of wealth and amazing businesses in Brazil. Why should they not be able to use their land to make profit?

abootstrapper• 7 years ago

Keep up.

chiefalchemist• 7 years ago

No doubt Jair Bolsonaro hasn't helped. However, this has been going on for a long, long, __long__ time. Tipping point or not, such spin on who's accountable is irresponsible.

forgotmypw32• 7 years ago

If you buy palm oil, you're complicit.

aitchnyu• 7 years ago

I thought you were digressing to Indonesian forests, but TIL Brazil wants the palm oil money too: https://www.theguardian.com/sustainable-business/2017/jun/29...

forgotmypw32• 7 years ago

I didn't even have to check. Anywhere warm and moist, land is being cleared for palm oil.

tempsolution• 7 years ago

There needs to be a new international law that classifies nations who deliberately destroy nature as "at war". The idea is simple: Wrecking your local environment is not a local action. It affects the entire planet and should be seen tantamount to war. This will likely pretty much put a lot of nations into the war section... Then negotiations can continue from there.

While military action is not feasible and in this case counterproductive, aggressive sanctions might help. Sanctioning these nations back into stone age if they don't change their course...

Right now, there is no accepted means to stop this from happening.

PinkMilkshake2• 7 years ago

It feels like we've reached the end of the old land ownership model. If you were destroying something on your land that supplied my breathable air, I would have no choice but to stop you, even though I recognize your right to the land.

ralusek2• 7 years ago

That's called a third party negative externality. Even libertarians are fine with state intervention.

PinkMilkshake2• 7 years ago

But what if a state is causing the negative externality and the third party is all other states? (Thanks btw, I hadn't come across that term.)

Amazon deforestation accelerating to unrecoverable 'tipping point'

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