The scenery, a turning point. The bright green forest sat in one quadrant at the top. The three others are bare, deforested land. This image of great visual impact was the cover of the prestigious Science magazine last week, which featured two articles on the Amazon region. The focus of one of them was precisely on that one lonely piece of green area.
Once deforested, the forest is no longer a forest. When degraded, on the contrary, that forest in the image, remains alive but its condition is afected. Impacts may ensue from changes in the carbon stocking, in species, in local humidity, or even in the relationship between people and the forest among others. However, the main factors are fire, logging, fragmentation of frontier forests and even the extreme droughts that have intensified due to climate change.
Not recently, have we been calling attention to the degradation of the Amazon forests and so have scientists who got here before us. But this has always been a cryptic, subtle and more complex problem to monitor when compared to deforestation. The conditions for investigating degradation have improved with the advances achieved in remote sensing tools and with the creation of land use monitoring platforms.
The article at Science Magazine, for instance, was a product of an extensive process of analysis of remote sensing, synthesis of data collected from the ground and discussions among the group of scientists who have worked in the region for decades. These discussions evolved from an event in Manaus to which we were invited and where current knowledge was summarized on the various factors promoting forest degradation, its impacts, expectations for the coming decades and the necessary interventions to solve the problem.
The forest area which has undergone some disturbances whether it is fire, fragmentation or logging (364,748km²) corresponds to more than the deforested area (112%). If we add extreme droughts to that scenery, about 38% of the Amazon has already been affected by some form of degradation. The problem is not restricted to the directly affected area, instead, the impacts, all together, reach a large circumscription. Carbon and biodiversity losses resulting from degradation are comparable to losses from deforestation. The alteration in the dynamics of the degraded forests promotes a reduction of up to one third in the evapotranspiration of the forests, which represents a significant impact on the production of rain.
The degradation of forests impacts whoever is close and also far away. Not only does it bring material losses, affecting subsistence as in the case of sources of food and other forest resources, but it also affects the loss of life quality for local and traditional communities. Violence, malnutrition, health and education impacts increase with the degradation of ecosystems. People's well-being may also be compromised by the perception of risk and loss of connection with the place where they live. This is what we are witnessing in light of recent revelations about the situation of the Yanomami peoples.
Degradation is not simply a way leading to deforestation. About 86% of degraded Amazonian forests continued to exist in recent decades, according to another study. Therefore, it can and should be treated with specific combat policies. We are at the turning point described by Science and we need to find solutions before it is too late.
