Deforestation and extreme blazes threaten the region’s biodiversity, risk transforming the rainforest into a semi-arid savannah and expose people to zoonoses that could spur new pandemics.
A repeat of 2019’s disastrous fire season is possible in 2020, and it would have dire consequences.
An Amazon forest in Brazil’s Para state after deforestation and wildfires March 9, 2019. Unlike in some tropical forests, the animals of the Amazon are not adapted to survive fire.
Gustavo Basso/NurPhoto via Getty Images
A new study finds 70% of Amazonian dung beetles were killed by the severe fire and droughts of 2015 to 2016. By spreading seeds and poop, dung beetles fertilize forests and aid regrowth of vegetation.
Destruction of rainforests through wildfires or deforestation may harm human health. As these forests disappear, we may be losing precious medicinal plants that hold treatments for various diseases.
Trees that survived a forest fire stand amid smoldering smoke in the Vila Nova Samuel region of Brazil, Aug. 25, 2019.
AP Photo/Eraldo Peres
Brazilian evangelicals are politically conservative, but they still believe in climate change. Turning them into climate activists, however, will be a challenge for the environmentalist movement.
Pope Francis at the start of the Amazon synod, at the Vatican, Oct. 7, 2019.
AP Photo/Andrew Medichini
Hundreds of bishops, priests, missionaries and tribal leaders are at the Vatican for the Synod of the Amazon, a three-week meeting focused on the environmental crisis threatening Amazonian peoples.
Prescribed fires are often done to eliminate weeds and renew the grasses in pastures for ranching across the Amazon.
Paulo Massoca
Reversing the damage from fires in Brazil’s rainforest is not as simple as allowing trees to grow back. Decades of research shows how fires degrade their long-term health and utility.
A protestor dresses as Jair Bolsonaro on Amazon Day in Rio de Janeiro, September 5 2019.
EPA-EFE/MARCELO SAYAO
If the Amazon rainforest functions as our planet’s lungs, what do raging wildfires threaten? An atmospheric scientist explains why the fires, though devastating, won’t suffocate life on Earth.