The world came to a standstill when dark clouds of smoke smothered the skies of Brazil for days on end. It made us understand environmental significances and concepts which shook us up to fully understand how deep underwater we are when it comes to the degradation of our surroundings. But what is the causation and impact of this fire?
The Amazon has been prone to burning during its dry season between July-October due to drought conditions, but lately, there has been a steady surge in these occurrences- going up to 30,091 this year which caused the resounding alarm. Drought is now not the only factor contributing to this, but the vast acres of land that are now being cleared by farmers and cultivators for crop production and grazing. The second question arises- how much does this matter? This matters because Amazon is the largest rainforest in the world and a vital carbon store that slows down the pace of global warming- a devil that the global environment has struggled with for a while. Numbers gathered by Inpe, Brazil’s satellite agency, suggest that at least 7,747 sq km of Brazilian Amazon rainforest has already been cleared so far this year and the catch is that recovering forest has more susceptibility to burning than normal forests. G-7 countries pledged $20 million on Monday to aid combat fires in the Amazon rainforest, which impend its capacity to capture carbon emitted into the atmosphere. But Brazil rejected the offer of aid, stating it to be already “in-control of the situation”. Apart from this, Amazon is largely responsible for the cycle responsible for providing rainfall to most of its areas: due to the forest efficiently performing the water cycle in voluminous amounts, it rains heavily in the Amazonian areas even during the non-rainy season. This drives the rainfall in areas such as Uruguay, Argentina, and Paraguay, with the influence extending to the snowcaps of the Northern Hemisphere.
With the Amazon responsible for cleaning up a quarter of the world’s carbon dioxide emission, we can say they are the lungs of the world; which are severely in danger at the moment. As stated by Aron Stubbins, a professor of marine and environmental science at Northeastern University, “Trees do that at a global scale,” he says. “Up here in Boston, if you went to measure carbon dioxide over a forest, you would see in the summertime that carbon dioxide goes down and in the winter it goes up as part of this cycle.” It has become necessary to us as a means of survival to now move the process of saving the Amazon to postpone the fatalities which follow post complete degradation.
Sharanya Mathur