From the Amazon to the Pantanal, the climate crisis settles in Brazil

The climate crisis has set in in Brazil, where extreme weather events are increasingly frequent, from deep droughts in the Pantanal to major sandstorms in Sao Paulo, all fueled by the increasing destruction of the Amazon.

The image hits. A group of capybaras and otters walk desperately towards a pool just stocked by a tanker in the Pantanal, the largest wetland on the planet, which Brazil shares with Bolivia and Paraguay.

Several institutions have contracted this service to supply some points of the biome that at this time of year had to have a minimum of water, but today they look dry.

“The thirst is so great that while the truck unloads the water, the animals are already arriving”Described the veterinarian Jorge Salomao, technical manager of the NGO Ampara Silvestre, one of the promoters of the initiative.

This year the drought has not only hit the Pantanal hard, but the entire southern half of the country.

Drought and deforestation in the Amazon, connected

According to official estimates, Brazil is suffering the worst water crisis in the last 91 years. The lack of rainfall has affected the largest Latin American economy in different aspects, from the supply of water to the population, to the generation of electricity, to the volume of crops.

Sand storms have also appeared that have covered entire cities in the states of Sao Paulo and Minas Gerais, the result, among other reasons, of the lower humidity that comes from the Amazon.

“We already feel the effects of climate changes in a profound way in Brazil”, Assured Paulo Nobre, researcher at the National Institute for Space Research (INPE) and an eminence in the field of climatology.

The main symptom is the alteration of the Brazilian hydrological cycle, with longer and more frequent dry periods.

The problem is not now. Brazil has lost 15.7% of its freshwater reserves between 1985 and 2020, according to satellite images analyzed by MapBiomas, an organization that brings together NGOs, universities and technology companies.

Among the factors that have contributed to this is the deforestation of the Amazon, which has accelerated under the mandate of Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro, a trend with dramatic consequences.

According to Nobre, there are indicators that the Amazon “it is already in a much more advanced process of ‘sabanization’”Of what satellites manage to capture from space.

“The guará-wolf, a typical animal of the Cerrado -biome known as the Brazilian savannah- has been detected walking through the Amazon and it is not that he is lost, it is that the conditions of that region are becoming familiar to him”, He explained.

The expansion of the agricultural sector is also worrying. In the last 35 years, Brazil tripled the area devoted to growing soybeans, whose production occupies 36 million hectares, an area larger than Italy or Vietnam, according to MapBiomas.

A problem also for health

Large-scale deforestation associated with climate change also represents a serious health problem, according to a study by the Oswaldo Cruz Foundation (Fiocruz), INPE and the University of Sao Paulo (USP).

The researchers, including Nobre, pointed out that some 12 million people in the Brazilian Amazon will be exposed to a “extreme risk of heat stress”Due to high temperatures until the year 2,100 if the region is transformed into a savanna.

Under these conditions, the human body will be unable to self-regulate its temperature, with the risk of dehydration and, in more severe cases, stress attacks and collapse of vital functions.

“It will be impossible to carry out activities of effort, of heavy load, such as civil construction or agriculture”, advises Beatriz Oliveira, public health researcher at Fiocruz Piauí.

A denialist government

Given the accumulation of evidence, international pressure for the Bolsonaro government, a climate change denier, to take action on the matter increases.

This week he presented a program of “green growth”That will take to the COP26 in Glasgow, in an attempt to wash its image.

However, this plan clashes with the measures taken to promote agribusiness and mining in indigenous reserves, cut the budget of environmental control bodies and bet on oil production with the intention of becoming the fifth largest exporter of crude in 2030.