By Jonathan Watts, October 23, 2023
Trees in the Florestal Reserve Adolpho Ducke in Manaus, Amazonas, Brazil, on April 3, 2021. The state of Amazonas has recorded 2,770 fires during the current dry season, which local media said was the highest recorded. Philip Fearnside, a senior researcher at the National Institute for Amazonian Research, said the rainforest was moving closer to a point of irreversible decline as dry seasons lengthen, along with more days of extreme heat and no rain. (IMF Photo/Raphael Alves/Flickr)
Editor’s note: This story was originally published by The Guardian. It appears here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.
A withering drought has turned the Amazonian capital of Manaus into a climate dystopia with the second worst air quality in the world and rivers at the lowest levels in 121 years.
The city of 1 million people, which is surrounded by a forest of trees, normally basks under blue skies. Tourists take pleasure boats to the nearby meeting of the Negro and Amazon (known locally as the Solimões) rivers, where dolphins can often be seen enjoying what are usually the most abundant freshwater resources in the world.
But an unusually dry season, worsened by an El Niño and human-driven global heating, has threatened the city’s self-image, the wellbeing of its residents and the survival prospects for the entire Amazon basin.
The forest capital has been enveloped in a murky brown haze reminiscent of China during its most polluted phase. The usually vibrant port has been pushed far out across the dried-up, rubbish-strewn mud flats.
So many fires are burning in the surrounding tinder-dry forest that air-quality monitors last week registered 387 micrograms of pollution a cubic metre, compared with 122 in Brazil’s economic capital of São Paulo. The only city in the world that measured worse was an industrial centre of Thailand.
A recent front page of the A Crítica newspaper showed a photograph of the drought-stricken port under the headline “Health in peril” and a story about the challenges of securing medicines and essential resources at a time when goods ships could not navigate the river. “Boiling Amazon” read the lead story of Cenarium magazine, which noted the unusually high heat and low humidity that have created dangerously dry conditions in the forest.
The drought has affected swathes of Brazil. The state of Amazonas has recorded 2,770 fires during the current dry season, which local media said was the highest recorded.
Although more droughts and fires than usual were to be expected in El Niño years such as this, local firefighting services were ill-prepared and ill-equipped.
The secretary of Borba town, said: “If municipalities had even the minimum structure in place, we could have avoided many problems.”
Jane Crespo, the environmental secretary of Maués, a community 155 miles (250km) from Manaus, said: “Some municipalities don’t have enough water to put out the fires.”
Rivers are the only means of access in many parts of the Amazon. As their levels have fallen, some communities have been cut off, raising concerns of a humanitarian disaster. Elsewhere, navigation is only possible by small boats, which make transport more expensive. At Tabatinga, Benjamin Constant and Atalaia do Norte, people complain that goods are becoming more expensive.
Factory production has also been hit by the lack of supplies, threatening the economy of Manaus and its reputation as a free-trade zone. Amazonas state authorities have called an emergency meeting to discuss the regional climate crisis and appealed to the federal government for assistance.
Road industry lobbyists are using the crisis to push demands for a new paved road – the controversial BR 319 – that would link Manaus to Porto Velho. Amazon conservationists warn this would be a disaster for one of the last remaining areas of globally important and intact forest.
The impact on other species is likely to be devastating. As well as the mass deaths of endangered river dolphins, countless other species are likely to be experiencing mortalities. The Manaus-based mycologist Noemia Ishikawa said she had noticed an almost total absence of mushrooms in the fields.
Philip Fearnside, a senior researcher at the National Institute for Amazonian Research, warned the rainforest was moving closer to a point of irreversible decline as dry seasons lengthen, along with more days of extreme heat and no rain.
Adding to the risks is a growing human population that is converting more forest into pasture, which is regularly burned. Fearnside said: “All of the tree deaths from these processes can contribute to initiating a vicious cycle, where the dead wood left in the forest serves as fuels for forest fires, which are both more likely to start and spread and are more intense and damaging if they occur.
“Repeated fires can destroy the forest entirely. In addition to tipping points in terms of temperature and dry-season length, there is also a tipping point from the loss of forest beyond a certain limit, which is also believed to be near at hand.”
Brief periods of upriver rain in recent days have raised hopes the dry season may be drawing to an end, but meteorologists say it is too soon to predict that with any confidence. However, climate trends make it almost certain that this drought will not be a record for long.
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There are at least three reasons to differ with Dr Fearnside’s assessment that the decline would be irreversible, none of which rests on any doubt of the severity of the threat of intensifying global Climate Destabilization.
In terms of the forest-product that could support prosperous communities, there is an emerging large-scale demand for bio-methanol [CH3OH] with over 180 methanol-fuelled ships already ordered from ship-builders just since August 2021. In addition, companies in Germany, Denmark, USA & China have begun commercial production of "Reformed Methanol Fuel Cells," which offer a practical supply of H2 for mobile fuel cell applications. (Methanol holds 98.9gH2 /litre versus 70.7gH2 /litre in cryogenically liquefied H2). See : https://www.blue.world/markets/heavy-duty/
Before the onset of subsidized Natural Gas the UK’s Standard Industrial Practice for methanol production was by tending Native Coppice Forestry for feedstock for charcoal retorts, whose hydrocarbon offgasses were reacted to methanol. The US NREL reports a methanol yield of 57% by weight from wood feedstock, which, on coppices yielding dry wood at 10t /ha /yr, implies an output of 5.7t /ha. What fraction of the product’s wholesale value accrued to the coppicers would be for the govt to oversee, but in addition there would be up to ~3.0t /ha /yr of charcoal output that would at best be sequestered in farmland in the form of "Biochar" as a valuable soil amendment. (See "Terra Preta").
This option would provide critical benefits beside offering a much better living than subsistence farming or cattle ranching. These include the hindrance of further forest clearances, the raising of crop yields and food security, the large scale sequestration of carbon in biochar, the large scale supply of green methanol to displace fossil fuels, and the restoration of forest cover to assist in restoring the hydrocycles on which the forest depends. Moreover, study of European coppices by the eminent ecologist, Prof Alastair Fitter, report that "In-cycle coppice holds the highest biodiversity of any European ecosystem."
The accessible and accurate title for the third strategic option is "Planetary Albedo Restoration" (not Solar Radiation Management). As eminent scientists such as Prof. Piers Forster have written, caution demands perhaps a decade of testing of a candidate technology before deployment could be considered by the international community. Since only one tech could be trialled at a time, the present question is of the criteria by which the prime candidate tech will be chosen.
Research in Cambridge by the team led by Prof. Sir David King (formerly UK Govt Cheif Scientist) addresses the "Marine Cloud Brightening" option which has significant merits needed by the prime candidate, including:
potential to be both tested and deployed only across the Arctic rather than around the entire planet;
potential to provide an effective intervention (being the provision of a sea-water mist in selected areas at around 1,000 metres) without introducing exotic chemicals to the atmosphere;
potential to respond to an adverse outcome by the intervention being rained out within a fortnight - as compared with ~2 years for the "Stratospheric Aerosols Injection" option;
potential to focus the cooling effect on the Arctic whose present accelerated warming disrupts the NH Jetstream that is driving the intensifying Climate Destabilization.
Quite apart from the major benefits for the Amazon of deploying a reliably benign means of global cooling via Planetary Albedo Restoration, it appears increasingly clear that it will be needed since global food security is already threatened by Climate Destabilization. Yet the consequences of Serial Global Crop Failures for geopolitical instability - not least in terms of halting essential climate diplomacy - have yet to be widely recognized.
Regards,
Lewis Cleverdon