Webinar: Amazon at Risk - 2020 Fire Season

You.

Hello everyone and welcome to our 2020 Knebinar Series. We still have people screaming in the door, as it were. About 100 folks have joined us so far, but that number is climbing as I speak, so we'll get started a little slowly here. I am Heatherstone, I am Chief Communications Officer at Woods Hole Research center and it is really my pleasure to be able to welcome you to our webinar this afternoon focused on the situation and the challenges facing the Amazon. First of all, I'd like to say thank you to the Knub family for supporting our efforts to share our work with public audiences like yourselves. Woods Hole Research center, for those of you who may not be familiar, is an organization of top scientists working with partners around the globe to understand and combat climate change. And you will see both those partnerships and the innovative approach to science that our scientists are taking in action today as we are proud to share our 2020Amazon Deforestation and Fire outlook with you. This is really a brand new analysis that pulls together all sorts of data, satellite data on deforestation and fire climate indicators, our best understanding of how much carbon is stored in forests and even geopolitics in the Amazon to provide a holistic and forward looking analysis of the situation in the Amazon. You actually may already have seen this report mentioned in the New York Times yesterday on CBS this Morning. This morning, unfortunately the news is not good news. But as you will hear, our scientists and our partners are working on not only understanding the problem but also working on developing solutions. And so I am just here to kick things off and get things started. I want to get you to those presentations as quickly as possible so that you are able to take in as much of this story and also have time for your questions to our scientists later in the event. Before we do that, I actually have a couple of questions for you though, and if you've been to our webinars already over the past few months, and I apologize, I think I was having a little bit of a microphone issue there. I think I had my notes too close to my microphone and I apologize for that. As somebody coming from a radio background, I should have known better, but hopefully it's better now before we get started. As I was saying, if you've been to our webinars before, we have a handful of polls that we usually ask folks and instead of asking you, the first question we've often asked is an easy enough one to answer. It's how old are you? But it comes with pitfalls. Not everybody likes to discuss their age. And as Some have pointed out to me, what if you have more than one person watching from the same household? The reason we've asked that question has in large part been to see whether or not we have students on the line. Because, of course, we did start start these webinars shortly after Massachusetts, where we are located, went to remote schooling and working from home as a result of COVID 19. And we were curious to see whether we had any students joining us. And so what I would like to do is ask you to use the raise hand feature if you can find that at the bottom of your screen. And if you are a panel, excuse me, a student joining us today, just go ahead and raise your hand and let us know. Terrific. We've got about, I think it's 10 folks who have raised their hand. Oh, a dozen or so. Thank you so much for joining us. We really love having students with us. For our webinars, these are really important topics. They're not watered down. But our scientists do a great job of really making them understandable for everybody. And it's so important for students and young people to get involved with these issues. So we're so glad to have you. Thank you so much. I'm going to go ahead and lower those hands and then launch a poll for everybody to answer. And this is kind of in the sense of, you know, if you actually were walking into a physical event space and kind of looking around the room to see who else is around you, we can't do that right now. But one of the great things that we can do in this virtual setting is actually bring together people from all around the globe. We're doing that with our panelists today, as you'll see. But we have also been doing that with our audiences with those of you joining us. And so I've launched this poll just to ask where you live or where you're joining us from today. You're free to interpret that either way that you would like. And as has been the norm, most of you joining us from the US Northeast or Canada, kind of our own backyard with Woods Hole Research center located in Massachusetts. But we are seeing folks today joining us from all over the U.S. the south, the Midwest, the west, as well as from Central and South America, from Europe and from Asia and the Middle East. So a really global audience today. We've still got folks voting. About 70, almost 80% of people have voted. So I'll give this another second and then we can share these results with you. But again, it's really great to be able to connect with so many of you from wherever you are and not be constrained by where we are.

So.

My final question is to get a sense of where we're all starting from in terms of the topic that you're going to hear about from our researchers, the Amazon, and in particular Amazon deforestation and fire. Now this was a huge story in the news in the United States and internationally last year and some of our researchers, in doing hundreds of interviews to get this story out to the public, started hearing feedback from folks that went along the lines of, but I thought we'd solved the problem in the Amazon. And so this is a really simple question. Just curious whether you were surprised by the news of fires in the Amazon last year. Were you perhaps among those who thought that we'd solved the problem in the Amazon? And this is not by way of shaming anyone, this is just to get a sense of sometimes how connected or not we are to these different stories and for that matter, how quickly they change. So the results as they're coming in. Actually a lot of you in the know, I guess about 75% saying no, not surprised by the news of fires in the Amazon last year and about a quarter of you saying yes, a little bit surprised. Votes are still coming in here, but the, the ratios aren't changing much. So I'll go ahead and share that result. Again, the majority saying no, not surprised. So we're clearly starting with a knowledgeable audience and that's not unusual for this group. I am going to, without further ado, kick it over to our panelists just to give you a sense of how the rest of this hour is going to flow. It's a pretty jam packed hour. We squeeze in what would often be an hour and a half or two hour event into one hour in this virtual setting. So you're going to hear from each of our panelists. That's Dr. Michael Koh, who is the Tropics program director at Woods Hole Research Center. And then you're going to hear From Ani Alencar, Dr. Ani Alencar, who is the director of science at EPAM, which is the Amazon Environmental Research Institute, Woods Hole Research Center's sister organization in Brazil. And then finally you're going to hear from Dr. Paolo Brando, who's currently an assistant professor at University of California, Irvine, but also adjunct scientist with Woods Hole Research center and with ties to epam. So that partnership and collaboration coming full circle. And so as I said without further ado, I am going to invite Dr. Mike Koh to start his video and share his slides and walk us through the 2020Amazon Deforestation and fire outlook.

Okay, I'm working on it. Okay, great. Thank you, Heather. Thank you everyone for joining us. It's really, really nice to see. We've got people from all over the world.

Oops.

There we go. So I'm going to start just by, with some context. This is a map of the Amazon basin in South America. And the take home message for this is the Amazon is really large. You know, it's as big as the continental United. So we're talking about and it encompasses, it includes one half of all tropical forests on the planet. So it's, I'm having a little trouble here, sorry. So it's one half of all tropical forests on the planet. So it's not just a forest, it's actually so large that it's an incredibly important part of the Earth's system. And by part of the Earth system, what do we mean? It means these forests literally make it rain. They evaporate a huge amount of water every day. One tree can evaporate 500 liters of water in a day. When you have billions of trees, that's a lot of water. And it travels throughout the world and creates rainfall. These forests also keep it cool. They cool the planet. They're in fact a giant air conditioner. All of that energy that goes into evaporation is taking up the atmosphere and cools the land surface. It cools it by as much as 5 degrees Celsius or 10 degrees Fahrenheit. These forests also soak up an enormous amount of carbon. The forests of the Amazon alone absorb something like 15% of all global emissions of CO2 each year. So they're providing this enormous service of taking, they're really the only way to take carbon out of the atmosphere based on land. They also of course, are home to an enormous amount of life. Something like 10% of all plant and animal species on Earth are in the Amazon, probably 1 in 5 birds or 20% of all birds. So they have an enormous value to climate and people. And this map I like this is just, this is showing the carbon density. So the greener it is, the more carbon there is. And what that shows, what we see is the Amazon is a really large portion of the global global carbon, global carbon stored in biomass. So what they're doing is, you know, these forests are directly combating climate change. And when we think about the problem of climate change, there's an enormous number of things that humans have to do to fight it. Primarily, number one, is of course, reduce CO2 emissions. But I'm also certain that there's no way we can succeed in stabilizing climate if we destroy the Amazon forests. Coming back to this map, this map of the Amazon, notice the yellow areas. Those are what has been deforested so far. So about 18%, almost 20% of the Amazon has been deforested already. And you look at that and you ask, how does this happen? How do we lose this much forest in a short period of time, really, in 40 years? And the answer is, it happens in increments, large and sometimes small. This is, you know, it adds up each year. This is a figure showing the amount of deforestation each year from 1996 to present. And you can see that some years were incredibly bad. In 2004, there were 27,000 square kilometers deforested. That's an area the size of Massachusetts that was deforested in one year. That's hard to imagine how that can happen, but it does. In the later part of the period, it's been less bad. Something like five to seven thousand square kilometers deforested each year. But it's still significant number when you add it up in town. This figure also tells a story about conservation efforts that have occurred during this time. You know, we look back in the 90s. In the 90s and early 2000s, a great deal of conservation effort by many, many organizations and people went into creating protected areas, setting this forest aside. And this effort was actually hugely successful. You know, by 2000, by the early 2000s, more than 50% of the Amazon was in some form of protection. Indigenous territory, conservation area, something like that. You know, imagine if one half the United States were protected. This is, you know, this is an enormous accomplishment. And by the early 2000s, a lot of effort then shifted into trying to end deforestation outside of protected areas. Because we couldn't protect everything, so we had to protect also on private properties. And by 2005, those efforts really began to bear fruit. Enforcement in Brazil was strong, and voluntary agreements to end deforestation were achieved with the big agricultural producers. And annual deforestation rates plummeted. After 2005, they really dropped rapidly. And so then a lot of effort after that went into trying to end this smaller amount of deforestation that continued to occur after 2009, something like 6,000 square kilometers a year. And that really was a lot of that was due to very small and also deforestation on small farms. You know, individuals who were cutting down a small amount of trees in order to make, just make it, you know, make enough crop to get through the year. And that during this period, we learned a lot about this process. But the rates stayed stubbornly around 6,000 square kilometers a year. And of course, now in the last two years, it has accelerated greatly. We had more than 10,000 last year and increasing this year even further. This figure shows basically the same thing, except it starts in 2004. And what it's also showing is where this deforestation is occurring. And this is interesting because you look at those green areas, that's the protected areas, that's 50% of the Amazon, but it's responsible for a very small amount of the deforestation that occurs each year. Those protected areas work very, very well. Blue is all the lands that aren't protected private property and public lands that have no designated status, they're owned by, you know, they're part of the public property, but they don't have a designation as a park or an indigenous reserve or something. But almost all deforestation occurs on these lands, and it's often illegal. People are deforesting on their land without a permit, or they're grabbing lands, they're stealing it from the public lands and claiming it as their own. So now we get to this year, we get to 2020. What's happening so far? This is a diagram. It's a rose diagram showing the amount of deforestation each month, starting in January in the upper portion. And so far in 2020, we have seen. We're seeing about 3,300 square kilometers has been deforested. That's an area the size of Rhode Island. That's 20% more than in 2019. If you notice the shaded bars in there underneath the gold, that's 2019. Each month this year has had more deforestation than it did last year. And last year was the worst year since 2008. So we're headed in the wrong direction. All that carbon in those trees that have been deforested so far will end up in the atmosphere eventually, mostly as CO2, leading to, of course, more greenhouse gas warming. What we find is the committed. So therefore, we find that the committed CO2 emissions, the CO2 embedded in those trees which are going to be burned, is about 115 million metric tons of that is equivalent to the annual emissions of 25 million cars. So we've committed the annual emissions of 25 million cars so far in the first six months of the year. And that's also the same amount as the annual emissions of North Carolina. So it's not a small amount of carbon. We're talking about and how does that, how does that carbon end up in the atmosphere? It basically fires are how all of that carbon will be emitted. After cutting down the trees, they'll be burned to rapidly clear the land. And as expected, with this high deforest predation rates, fires are well ahead of 2019. Essentially every month this year has been larger than has had more fires than it did at this time in 2019, which again was an astoundingly bad year. And we haven't gotten to the severe months yet. August and September are usually the months of greatest fires and we're not there yet. So finally think about where are we headed, what might happen this year? How might climate play a role in outcomes? And As I mentioned, 115 million metric tons of CO2 are already committed. And that's from what's been deforested. But that doesn't include nearby standing forests that will be damaged from those fires if they escape. And escape fires can greatly multiply the effects of deforestation. And it's a big problem when it's dry. When it's wet, fires rarely burn for long. But when it's dry they can last a long time and they can go far great distances, damaging or killing very large areas of forest. This map shows where recent deforestation has occurred. That's red. And how dry the yellows or wet blues. So far most of the Amazon is relatively wet. This is as of June, beginning of June. It's early in the dry season in the south, so it's usually pretty wet. But there are some very dry areas. You see these gold areas towards the south. Another worrisome because that's also areas that coincide with where a great deal of deforestation has already occurred. So those areas really have to watch closely. That's where fires will eventually be lit to destroy, to get rid of those trees. And they could get out of control and cause enormous problems. So it's at this point that I'm going to turn it over to Ani, Ani Omkar, and she's going to talk in much greater detail about what 2019 and 2020 me.

Great.

Thank you so much, Mike. And we'll take just a moment here to switch over to Ani Alankar, Director of Science at ipam. Ani, I can see your video is up, so go ahead and share your screen and take it away.

Hello everyone, Good afternoon. It's a pleasure to be here sharing with you some news from the Amazon. And I'm going to talk a little bit further and give a perspective of what was the fire season that we had last year and how we are coming, I mean, preparing ourselves to the new fire season this year. So when I see that most of you are actually from United States, but there are other people from other places. And when we think about fire in us, basically you think about the effect of weather, like of climate. And last year when they had that massive fires in the Amazon, a lot of people say, oh, maybe it's something related to the, to the climate, maybe it's burning because it's dry. And what we saw, and this graph shows very, very clearly that last year, which is the blue line, actually it was a fairly wet, I mean, in a way, how can I say, very average year for the Amazon, even though we had fires in Australia, some fires in South America, but for the Amazon, actually when the fires happened, we had less days without rain, which is a good indicator of how dry is the system that we had the years before. So the fires that happened in the Amazon were not related to weather or to climate. So, and this is the picture of the fires that happened last year. So we have the peak of fires happening in August and usually it is very uncommon because usually the peaks of fire in the Amazon are in September. And there is a reason for that. If you all remember, we were always scared about how fires went through in August. And in the end of August we had two decrees. The government released two decrees, very important ones. One like putting the army available for the states to actually fight fires. And the other one was related to the moratorium, like a fire moratorium of two months. And in fact we believe that these two decrees did give some, had some effect on reducing fires. And you can see very clearly in the graph, in the yellow lines, but it didn't have an effect on deforestation. And why I'm saying that. And what is the relationship between fire and deforestation? I mean, there are two major types of fire in the Amazon. The Amazon forest actually is very sensitive to fires. Fires are not common in the region unless they are set by someone, a natural forest fire. It's a very rare event. So which means that the fires that we have seen in the Amazon are all man made. I mean, someone went there and set up the fire. And one of the major sources of ignition for the fires are the fires that, that follow deforestation. So the trees are cut down and then is left to dry. And one or three or five months after that they set fires. So, and the other way that fires occur in the Amazon are fires to clean pasture or old crop fields. So those are the major types of fire. And when we have a very bad climate condition, which are usually caused by El Nino or any other climatic event that generates droughts in the Amazon. And when we have that, so these fires, the deforestation fires, and also the fires from cleaning pasture can escape and go into the forest. But that was not the case last year because we had a very average, how can I say, climatic condition. So how we are this year, as Mike showed, we are demonstrating the same trend that's last year in terms of deforestation and actually a little bit higher. So we are 21% higher in terms of deforestation than last year. And that is very, very worrisome. Because this area, there were these forest areas that were deforested are going to be burned. And how this represents in terms of tenure category. So most last year, almost half of deforestation and almost half of fires happened in public lands. And we haven't seen anything different this year. So, so these graphs are from January to March, but if you put that to May or June, we will see almost the same thing. Most of the fires are happening in private property up to now, but in terms of different, which are basically fires to clean pasture and things like that. But if you take a look on the numbers of deforestation, most of deforestation, actually a little bit more than 50% is happening in public lands which are undesignated forest, public forest, protected areas and things like that, which are basically illegal deforestation and basically done by people that want to speculate with land. And why is this so important? If you take the areas that were deforested last year and not burned, because all the decrease and things like that, it gives us an average area, an area of about 4, almost half of the area that was deforested last year. So which means that this area is going to burn. And also we will have the areas that is being deforested this year, which means that if we stop deforestation right now, we probably would have the same amount of fire that we had last year. So it's very crucial to stop deforestation right now. So these are the numbers, and those are the regions that were deforested and not burned. So we know exactly where the government should go to fight deforestation to reduce the pressure to have fires. And this is just to make the connection with COVID in a way. I mean, our health system in the Amazon are already in collapse. And usually during the burning season, which is starting now and has the peak in September, a lot of people go to the hospitals. I mean, there are a lot of respiratory diseases, infection due to the pollution caused by the burnings. So if we have the perspective of having the same amount of area burned that we had last year, we will probably have a lot of people going to the hospitals, but the hospitals are already full because people, people are hospitalized due to the COVID So it's a very, very dramatic problem that we have to face in this new fire season. Just to finish, I think it's very important to understand how this affects Brazil. I mean, if there is one piece of our economy that has been affected, but not very much affected, is the agribusiness. And the Brazilian agribusiness has been very sensitive to reputational risk caused by, how can I say, the country not following sustainable practices and also fighting deforestation. And if we go the way we are going, we are expecting to have up to 15,000 square kilometers deforestation in the end of the cycle deforestation cycle, which ends in July this year. And this is almost 50% higher than last year in terms of greenhouse gas emissions. Like Brazil, is the land use change driven by deforestationism. Already most of our emissions, about 44% of the country emissions, is directly related to deforestation. While the globe is reducing its emission due to the quarantine and effects of COVID we will be likely to increasing our emissions from 10 to 20% according to this report that we launched in March.

So.

My final remarks is that we can burn deforestation and fires by half right now. If we in fact do strategic enforcement and do and designate public lands. So this would represent already cutting by half deforestation without entry in the process of giving some economic incentives to producers, to smallholders and things like that. So if there is a way to go and actually to fight deforestation and fires, illegal deforestation fires, you should, without entering in the process of giving some economic incentives to producers, to smallholders and things like that. So if there is a way to go and actually to fight deforestation and fires, illegal deforestation fires, you should go start by fighting deforestation fires in public lands. And this will cut by half of our problem. Thank you.

Great. Thank you so much, Ani. And last but certainly not least, we are going to turn to our final panelist, Paolo Brando. Paolo, if you're able to start your video and share your slides, Paolo is going to talk to us about looking beyond 2020, a forward looking, longer term perspective on what all of this means for the future of the Amazon and of our climate more broadly.

Thank you so much, Heather. And thank you, Woods Hole Research center for giving the Opportunity to talk about such an important topic. And here I'm going to talk about these Amazon tipping points that are this concept that if we inflict a lot of pain to the Amazon, we may transform the Amazon into something else, an impoverished system with fewer larger trees, with not so diverse and so on, so forth, Right? So the question is, are we getting close to this tipping point by keeping the forest in the region, by changing the region's local and regional climate, and by using fire across the region to clear the forested areas? As Mike pointed out, we have some numbers that we see every year coming out in the news about the size of the deforestation in the Amazon and that size of deforestation. Usually we look at one year, one point of the time, but we have to keep in mind that these effects accumulate over time. And so we are getting close to an area of 800,000 square kilometers, over 800 times larger than Cape Cod, or 10% larger than the state of Texas of cleared land in the Amazon. And so if you look at points by point every year, yes, it's very important to reduce. But the larger point here is that we're reaching 20% of the Amazon with cleared land with no forest. And those effects are important. And a lot of this has to do with how forests and how big trees specifically use water. Here's a photo I took last year above the canopy in the Atto tower at the heart of the Amazon near Manaus. And you can see this is about 40 meters tall. And each one of these big trees cycle a lot of water because they have these really deep roots that can pump water from the soil into the atmosphere. Year long. There is no hard times, no dry season. They keep providing this important ecosystem service for our society, and in doing so, they can cool down the temperature and even contribute to up to 30% of the rainfall. So the forests contributed almost 30% of their own rainfall. That's remarkable. So it's no surprise if you clear huge chunks of forest like this is very common in the region where War and Mike and Ernie, that there will be changes to the hydrological cycle and in this capacity to cool down surfaces and to make rain. So this is widespread. And in the arc of deforestation, where deforestation is concentrated, we have about almost 12 to 15% of the forest close to an open field, to an agricultural field. And that is very important because those agricultural fields change the way air moves in and out from the forest, drying fuel, killing big trees, and having major impacts in terms of forest flammability. So forests become more Flammable as these edges are formed. Just an example here in our field site in southeast Amazon, we collaboration with Michael Cole and Marc Macedo and others, we keep measuring the soil moisture. Because this is a process of the water that is not going into the atmosphere when you clear the land. And many people get surprised here that we look soil moisture going down to 15 meters or deeper than 50ft into the soil get more moisture in this agricultural fields over cropland. And it's because we don't have the trees pumping the water into the atmosphere. And that is key for the survival of the Amazon as we know it. Because if you cut down that ability of the system to recycle water, we will impact the ability cool down the entire region. And also to make rain. Not all the rain, of course, but maybe the changes in precipitation would be large enough to affect the health of the system. And this is a key concept with the tipping point. If we change climate in a way that affects the health of the remaining forest, those forests remain in a state that cannot maintain the characteristics that we see now. Of course, where we draw the line and say this is a tipping point is very difficult thing to do. And to say, what is this new condition, this new force that you're gonna see if you keep deforest in the region and changing the way it works? This is a time lapse of deforestation from the 80s all the way to now or last year for the Xingu region where we mostly work. And I can see this massive deforestation that took place in the region, except for this huge chunk in the middle. And this huge chunk of forest in the middle turns out to be one of the most important, one of the largest indigenous reserves in the planet, where we have several indigenous groups protecting these forests and relying on natural resources for their survival. And because of these changes in deforestation, or changes in land use because of deforestation, the accumulated effect combined with the accumulation of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, we are changing one of the most important metrics to predict whether this forest will survive. That is not the total amount of rainfall, but how it's distributed along the year. So the longer we have a dry season, the less likely that we find forest in these regions. If we increase from this region where we saw this deforestation happening, the dry season is one month. We have a climate that is very unlikely to support forests. For example, over the past four decades, we're changing the precipitation or the dry season length by about six days. So far, we have a dry season that is about 24 days. Longer than it was in the past. This trend is likely to continue into the future. One of the big catalyzers of change may be fire, because with climate change, we may expect some small reductions in forest health over time. Droughts may accelerate. That process adds up to this forest hedges. But if you get fire in this picture escaping from these open fields that Mike and Annie talked about and go into this forest, the dive back of the Amazon tipping point may occur much faster. This is just a blider imagery showing forest height and how forest fires are much more severe close to these edges where you have the blue pretty much have no vegetation. It's because the fires killed all these trees. And you can see that some large trees survive these fires that happen from that escape from open fields into this forest. But these big trees usually have a much shorter lifespan because fire damages. So it can really damage forests really fast by including fire into the picture. And one of the things we're afraid is that these effects, they're not additive. We don't add them and calculate degradation. We multiply them, leading to very uncertain effects, nonlinear effects, exponential effects. And to get more of the Amazon in this unhealthy state, we may affect forests elsewhere by changing the basic properties. And I'm going to stop here. Thank you.

Great. Thank you so much, Paolo. And I'm going to now invite all of our panelists to turn on their cameras and their microphones to so that we can see everybody as we move into more of a discussion and a Q and A. And true to form, our wonderful audience has already been peppering us with questions. These questions never fail to be really, really great ones. And so I'm just going to jump right into some of these questions from the audience. The first one, and I know Mike and Ani, you both touched on this, but for those not intensely familiar with the Amazon, it can be hard to wrap our heads around who all the different stakeholders are and what roles they're playing. And one of the first questions we got is just, can you clarify kind of. And it's probably not possible. It's probably not accurate, I should say, to point the finger at one and say, who's causing this problem? Right. But can you clarify for us kind of who are the major players and the major types of behaviors that are driving this alarming deforestation and fire trend?

Should I start or mind?

Jump right in, Ani, please.

I'm just, you know, I position myself in a place that there was no sun before, and now I have the.

Sun and the sun has moved yeah.

This is a very good question. As you may notice, like if we tackle in this 50% of deforestation that I talked, that is happening in public lands, who are the agents, the major agents, the major drivers of this deforestation. So basically are people that want to make easy money with land that is from the government, are land speculators, are land grabbers. These people, they just think that is the risk of investing in invading land in the frontiers, in the agricultural frontiers of the Amazon that are not still designated to some specific use. And they are going to make money with that. They are going to have a market to sell these lands later on. And this in fact is the main problems, the main problem that we are facing because these people don't see a risk, they don't have the risk of being punished.

So.

The way that the environmental policy has been treated in Brazil is leading us to believe that, that people that do some environmental, how can I say crime, because this is a crime, it's illegal activity is actually going to be punished.

So another question that we got from the audience is again an astute observation that of course the Amazon encompasses not just Brazil, but several countries. And most of the data that we have presented today relates to Brazil. The question is, are there any joint efforts between countries to stay stop deforestation? And I might actually preface that question with, you know, do we fully understand the nature of the problem in all of these different countries? And you know, how much room is there for these different countries to work together on this issue jointly?

Just one point, the scientific point about these efforts. After the fires in 2019, several governments of the Amazon got together in the legislative pact and that opened an opportunity to put together a special report about the state of the Amazon with some specific directions to reduce the impacts of deforestation to this big complex system that includes major scientists from all over the countries that comprised Amazon. And I think that is a very important initiative not to have only Brazil, but to have these other countries that are also experiencing challenges, including Colombia, parts of Bolivia, Peru and so on, so forth.

One major driver of deforestation in other countries are related to mining. Mining is also a big driver in Brazil, mainly recently indigenous lands, they are being very hit by invasion by miners, illegal miners. So each country has one specific, how can I say driver in a way, and most of them one thing that unifies them is the relationship between criminals activities include including drugs.

Paolo, a question that I'll direct to you is whether there is any large scale regeneration occurring. In other words, once an area is deforested, how Permanent is that loss and are there efforts or natural processes of forest restoration going on on a large scale?

That's a very important question. There is a small fraction of wood of deforestation that is left alone, right. So some of the forest recover is a small portion the total deforested areas. Because if you think about the investment that goes into clearing a chunk of forest is massive. And once you grow cattle then becomes more valuable for the farmer or who owns that land or is trying to own that land. And if you go into something that requires even more investment, like a crop land or industrialized or mechanized agricultural system, then it's very unlikely that that area is going to go back into forest unless the law requires and there is some pressure incentive to do so. But it's. I may be wrong, but I want to guess it's less than 10% of the total area is left to regrow and some of those areas are recut again.

And I have to mention that Paolo joined us for one of our first webinars back in the spring to talk about how if policies and the choices were made to try to restore areas of the Amazon, what might be some of the most effective ways to do that. And it came down to wildlife and tapirs, which was a really fun and informative discussion. So if you didn't see that webinar, go back and check that out. I won't hijack this particular discussion with that. But really fun and interesting science. Mike, a question for you if I can refind it here in the rapidly growing list that I want. Wanted to ask you a great question here. What is the current understanding of the interactions or the synergies between global climate change, the changes in the local water cycle and these deforestation effects?

Yeah, that is a good question that follows on from what Paolo was talking about was the fact that deforestation changes the climate in a negative way. It makes it drier. At the same time, we have global climate change occurring and it's clearly already occurring in much of the Amazon. We can already see as much as 1 degree C increase in temperature in the southern Amazon from global climate change. So that does not work. That is not working in our favor either. So when we multiply those two, the future is looking. It's looking more and more difficult and maintain forests in some of these southern regions because we have compounding problems and certainly we can't do it if we don't stop deforestation. This was a point of paper that Paolo led earlier in the year was we're probably in trouble in the Coming decades, fires will definitely increase. But if we end deforestation, they will not increase nearly as much as if we continue to deforest. So we have one problem, which is climate change, which we really can't, the Amazon isn't going to solely address. But then we have the interior problem, which is deforestations, we can't address.

We have a growing number of questions here and I will tell you all in the audience that we will unlikely, we will not likely be able to get to all of these questions in the next 12 minutes. But we do have a question here. Ani and Paolo, being on the ground in Brazil, perhaps you can address a bit which is how the COVID 19 pandemic is intersecting with this deforestation and fire crisis.

Yeah, the pandemic. Actually we just recently launched our report that talks about how the pandemic is affecting Brazil's emissions in several sectors and the two sectors that are related to the rural area, which are the agriculture sector and the land use change sectors. The agriculture sector has a negative effect of the pandemics because people are eating less meat and the meat, the cattle herds are staying more in the pasture fields, so they are emitting more methane. And so there's this effect on climate change, more greenhouse gas emissions being emitted. But in terms of deforestation, which are basically land use, land cover change, the pandemic seems to be affecting the rhythm of deforestation because it's continuing to go up. So this is something that we found out. So people would say that the deforesters are not doing. Home Office.

Paolo, anything you'd like to add on that front?

I would add especially the indigenous peoples in the Xingu, for example, that are highly vulnerable to Covid and also fire. Fire is a practice used for millennia to clear land. And now with this huge disruption in food flow between indigenous groups and the cities, there is a push to do more of that slash and burn agriculture in local to guarantee food production. But then at the same time you may create a huge problem when both intersect with smoke related food fire and Covid. And Covid is getting little by little into these indigenous communities.

I want to raise an announcement that was just made today about the possibility of a ban on fire and get each of your thoughts on how significant that would be. And so perhaps first Ani, if you would just give us the basics of what that announcement was and how significant you think that is.

Yeah, a ban on fire is very important, mostly to stimulate more deforestation. So it's fundamental and this is also important because we don't want to have a compound effect of the fires and people getting sick by because of the smoke and the pollutants caused by smoke with the COVID also the COVID 19 hospitalization. So they don't want to have that compound effect. So the ban is very important. However, a lot of people in the Amazon, smallholders, indigenous peoples, they do need to use for some type of activities. And those people, there should be some, how can I say, allowance for them. So if this band has this care, I mean, takes into account that I think is going to be a very positive thing.

Mike, anything you'd like to add, thoughts on that?

The one thing I would add is I think this was a government response driven by basically agitation from business communities saying that Brazil needed to get. The business community in Brazil wrote a manifesto, in essence, saying that Brazil had to get deforestation and fires under control. I think that's a really positive aspect also is that public pressure, corporate pressure, in this case, lists of response from the government. A positive response from the government.

Paolo, any additional thoughts on the possibility of a ban on fire?

So one point that I think is very important. Last year there is a decree to reduce fires, to stop and fight fires that was somehow effective because there are two components. We knew where the fires were, the cause of those fires, and there was some political will from the federal government and the state government. So only a decree that ban on fire is not enough. You have to have that action to actually enforce, implement and create the ways to prevent those fires from happening without suffering from marginalized populations. So we gave the first step and I think it's very important now the second one, because we know where the problem is. We know all that. We can monitor the Amazon as never before, and we know where the problems are and we know many of the solutions.

Well, that's a great transition to the final question that I would like to ask each of you with the last six or seven minutes that we have this afternoon. And Paolo, I'll start with you. Since you mentioned solutions and knowing what some of the solutions are. A number of folks have asked what are the possible solutions? And in particular from I think our audience here in the US a lot of interest in how do we, from afar with our own individual actions, try to drive the sorts of changes and solutions that are needed.

So I would leave more specifics to Anj and Mike because they are much more knowledgeable about that. But I would say vote properly and think a lot about your vote. They have a big impact to start with. But secondly, just make the point that forests are extremely, extremely resilient. They grew up, they evolved with a lot of beating. Right. They had to compete and fight to be where they are. So if we leave them alone a little bit, they can rebound. Those forests that are burned many times, they can rebound very fast. But if you keep adding difficult problems to deal with, they outside what they're used to, then becomes a huge challenge. But there is a positive message that we should exclude fire, stop deforestation, and leave the biological complexity that forms the forest. They are much more likely to remain something that we relate as forests. And I think the example of the tapirs are something very special, that the tapirs may just carry out a lot of seeds all over the burned forest in our experiments, contributing almost 10% of the seeds that are used to restore an area. One big animal. So leaving them alone, they can bounce back and remain healthy in many ways.

Great. Thank you so much. Paolo, Ani, would you like to share with us some ideas about solutions to the problems that we've outlined and how individuals can start to intersect with those perhaps?

Yeah, I like the vote part because that represents political will. Political will actually has demonstrated before to reduce deforestation and fires in the region. I mean, we came from a peak of more than 25,000 square kilometers to almost 5,000 square kilometers from 2004 to 2011. So a major reduction in deforestation. And it was exactly in the same time that we were having our exports in soybean, in our production of cattle herds. Growing up like growing so. Which means that Brazil was actually doing its. What is inherent to the country, actually conserving its nature and also producing a lot of food. So we can do that. We already did that. We know how to do that. And we never had as much as tools to help us do that than we had now. So I think it's possible. And the way to start, as I said in my presentation, start with the 50% of illegal activities, start with tackling the public lands. Deforestation in public lands. We will reach the 5,000 square kilometers that we had in 2011.

All right, and Mike, last but not least to you, thoughts on solutions and how to get involved.

So being outside Brazil, being based here in the United States, I concentrate on what Ani's saying. The illegal activities, this wasn't occurring on this scale four years ago, five years ago. So what can we do? I think our role here is to get the information out. This is what we can do. We can help make sure the public is very, very well informed on what is actually happening there because public pressure does make a difference. You know, even if the government is not necessarily, not necessarily wanting to make changes, they still pay attention to the public opinion, as Ani points out. And even international public pressure can work well on the government. The Leticia pact that Paolo brought up was in part because international pressure was put on Brazil in particular. So I think what we can do from this distance is help get the information out so we all are very well informed about what really is happening, who's doing it.

Well, thank you Michael Koh, Paulo Brando, Ani Alencar for those wonderful presentations and for fielding all of these questions to our audience. Thank you for joining us. Almost 200 people at the peak of today's webinar and a couple dozen questions. Obviously we weren't able to get to all of them, but we do appreciate you showing up to learn more and engaging, asking great questions. Thank you so much. We would invite you to join us again in a couple of weeks for another webinar. We're going to continue on the fire theme, but turn our attention to a very different part of the planet and head up to the Arctic, which you may also have seen in the news recently, for extreme heat and a fire season that is getting going early. We're going to talk about that and what its global climate consequences are. So please do check that out on our website, whrc.org while you're there. Sign up for our newsletter to stay informed. As Mike was just saying, stay informed and get all of the information that we have to provide about our science. And for that matter, please consider making a gift to support the work of of Woods Hole Research center and IPAM to understand and combat deforestation and the challenges facing the Amazon. Thank you again all for your presentations and thank you to our audience for being with us today.

Thank you.