15 ms·

Brazil scientists map forest regrowth keeping Amazon from collapse: Study

158 points by billyharris 6y ago

jamesblonde 6y ago
I can only assume this is astro-turfing. The Amazon is near a tipping point of total destruction - https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-00508-4 https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-00508-4 If your pants are on fire and you piss in them, you don't say "look how wet your pants are getting".
- caiob 6y ago
  Despite what these “studies” say, the Amazon is NOT near a tipping point of destruction. In fact, it’s not even close. These publications fail to disclose that these fires are seasonal and will continue to happen without man-interference. These so-called protection of the Amazon is part of an agenda rich countries have to keep Brazil uncompetitive. How about we start rebuilding green space in Western Europe? How about we start planting more trees in southern California?
  - neuronic 6y ago
    I am going to go ahead and put more credibility into peer-reviewed research in Nature than some random HN comment without sources.
    - gus_massa 6y ago
      The link is no not a peer-reviewed research in Nature, it is a "News Feature" written by "a science writer based in Manaus, Brazil." The cites for the tipping point are two editorials written by the same team of two researches in Science Advances, these are editorials, not research articles. They cite https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1029/2007GL030612 https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1029/200... that is a peer-reviewed research article in Geophysical Research Letters. The research article claims that with a 40% deforestation the rain reduction will cause problems, but in the editorial they use hand waving to reduce that to 20%.
- antisthenes 6y ago
  I think this is the most telling tidbit, right at the top of the article: > According to their findings, 12% of total carbon emissions from Amazon deforestation have been offset by Brazil’s secondary forests, making natural regrowth an underestimated tool for mitigating global carbon emissions and regional ecosystem collapse. 12% of carbon offset is better than 0, but still catastrophically low. Just means the the destruction of the Amazon rainforest is just slightly slower than previously thought.
  - rorykoehler 6y ago
    I'm more worried about bio-diversity loss than carbon offset tbh. This is purposefully framing the issue in a way to steer the conversation away from what really matters.
    - eecc 6y ago
      Purposefully? That’s a charged accusation, can you substantiate it?
    - brutusborn 6y ago
      And "really matters" is just an opinion. Can you say why carbon offset doesn't really matter or why bio-diversity loss really does? I'm genuinely curious.
      - danielheath 6y ago
        We are currently extinguishing biodiversity at a rate close to 100k years per year (that is, recovery-via-evolution of the biodiversity lost in any recent year will take 100k years). Some of that biodiversity isn’t load-bearing (that is, we can do fine without it), but some of it is and we will be paying for it’s loss essentially-forever.
      - Rexxar 6y ago
        Carbon offset can be done somewhere else or later, biodiversity is lost forever.
      - 6y ago
- jillesvangurp 6y ago
  Not necessarily; fatalism never solves any problems. The article just highlights that historically the problem has been ignorance. We treat the Amazon as this vast ocean of un-mapped green where all sorts of people can hide; entire tribes of native Americans reside there that have had little or no contact with the modern world. We simply don't know what is going on there in very large detail. Well, thanks to modern mapping, now we do. Formerly easy to hide and illegal activity like burning a bit of forest to get some farm land now stands out and we can track what happens or happened to bits of land. That's basically what the article is pointing out is actually happening. A few bits of information in there: - Forest regeneration is slow but significant; up to 40% of forest thought to be lost over the past decades has in fact regrown. It's a slow process that takes up to 4 decades to fully restore bio diversity. But it's possible and happening at pretty significant scale. - The whole process is basically driven by poor land management, ignorance, and incompetence. Farmers mismanage their soil, thus exhausting it and then burn more forest to solve their problem while abandoning their old land, which then starts regenerating if left alone. - Mapping provides authorities better insight where this is happening or has happened and allows them to step up attempts to crack down on this to both protect regrowing forest and put a stop to new attempts to burn forests. Simply scaling up that effort could go a long way to fixing the problem. Farming by its very nature is very local. If authorities show up within weeks of you burning a forest to start growing stuff, it gets a lot more risky. Burning forest is the lazy option; it's only convenient if you can get away with it. Mapping can fix that.
  - thaumasiotes 6y ago
    > fatalism never solves any problems Fatalism solves problems of resource misallocation. You're better off putting in the effort to solve problems you can solve than putting in the effort to solve problems you can't solve. Assuming there's a limited amount of effort, fatalism will help you.
  - mschuster91 6y ago
    > If authorities show up within weeks of you burning a forest to start growing stuff, it gets a lot more risky. Burning forest is the lazy option; it's only convenient if you can get away with it. Mapping can fix that. Mapping doesn't do shit if the politicians don't act - and Bolsonaro is hellbent on not acting in the interest of anyone but the rich people paying him off (https://www.bbc.com/news/world-latin-america-49815731 https://www.bbc.com/news/world-latin-america-49815731). If the rainforest is to be saved, Bolsonaro must be removed one way or the other - and I'm not sure that it will be possible at all to remove that guy at the voting booth anymore. Personally I'd welcome some sort of intervention by one of the three-letter agencies - this time it could be actually for a good cause.
paganel 6y ago
This won't work unless we, as a species, cut out on meat (beaf+pork) consumption and also smaller houses/apartments would help (that would mean less need for furniture, i.e. less need for cutting down trees). No-one is going down in the Amazon to cut down trees just for the heck of it or because they are Bolsonaro's croons, they're doing it because there are very strong economic incentives to do it.
- ajot 6y ago
  I always find funny how first world citizens don't want the Amazon being (ab)used, or dislike the palm oil industry, but still want to keep and develop their own agricultural lands AND their living standards.
  - zorked 6y ago
    I'm a reasonably hardcore environmentalist but this is true. There will be many armchair experts here suggesting that stuff should be done in Brazil but they never propose things like "let's shut down New York for two months per year", or "let's impose mileage quotas on North American vehicles" or "let's reduce German manufacturing by 50%".
    - Erlich_Bachman 6y ago
      Because none of those things are going to happen and it would hurt a lot of people in a lot of ways if they would.
      - ajot 6y ago
        Living in an economically underdeveloped country also hurts a lot of people in a lot of ways. Why not buffer this suffering with the whole world?
      - pelasaco 6y ago
        Brazil has a population of 200 million people. Is that a lot of people?
rmsaksida 6y ago
The only fair way to curb the deforestation of the Amazon is to make the economic incentive of not cutting it down greater than the incentive of cutting it down. In other words, Brazil needs to be compensated for not utilizing its natural resources. The majority of Western countries exhausted their natural resources (including forests) for economic gain and have no right to point fingers at Brazil, especially when they buy meat and soya from Brazil. It's important to note that Brazil has more preserved nature and a smaller carbon footprint than most - all? - countries that criticize it. I'm all for preserving the Amazon but the entitlement and double standards that surface in discussions about this subject are ridiculous.
- morceauxdebois 6y ago
  Should the US compensate China so they don't exterminate the Uigurs, they got to cleanse a whole continent of indigenous people.
  - farias0 6y ago
    Are they interested in keeping the Ulgurs alive?
  - pelasaco 6y ago
    The interesting discussion would be about the indigenous people (Native people so to speak) in Germany and France claiming back land exactly as we Germans try to enforce in Brazil and US.
    - delecti 6y ago
      There are German and French indigenous? Do you have any more info? I'm super curious to learn more, but I'm not sure what search to start with.
      - pelasaco 6y ago
        Well Indigenous are nothing else than Native people. Or how do you define Indigenous? You could start with a dictionary ;) From Oxford Dictionary: originating or occurring naturally in a particular place; native. "the indigenous peoples of Siberia" Beside it you have for sure groups like Sorbs and Danes[2] References: [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indigenous_peoples https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indigenous_peoples [2]: https://www.refworld.org/docid/4954ce03c.html https://www.refworld.org/docid/4954ce03c.html [3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Germans#:~:text=The%20migration%2Dperiod%20peoples%20who,the%20formation%20of%20the%20Germans https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Germans#:~:text=The%20migratio....
lanevorockz 6y ago
De-Florestation in Brazil was really hard to curb. A lot of it is caused by fake benevolence. A good example NGOs that take money to protect the amazon, the process goes like this : raise money / buy land / cut 70% of the land / replant / advertise the replanting / repeat ... It is completely legal and the environmentalists are in favour of that. At some point they might own the whole thing. Problem is that this is the cause of the fires, these new replanted forests are nowhere as dense and humid as the new quick raising ones. Current Government did two things, relaxed on releasing the amazon satellite data and curbed down the 70% allowance to 30%. That might make it less profitable for the NGOs and maybe the reason they only recently double down on the rhetoric.
- robotbikes 6y ago
  This is a pretty big claim, or that NGOs cut down 70% of the land they buy. Do you have any links that contain news or evidence that this practice is widespread and the allowance change ?
  - zorked 6y ago
    This is a conspiracy theory supported by Bolsonaro and his supporters. In reality NGOs active in the Amazon are more likely to live under death threats and barely have any funding at all for even basic activities.
    - pelasaco 6y ago
      As you put looks like the Amazon before was well protected. Just look the data https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deforestation_of_the_Amazon_rainforest https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deforestation_of_the_Amazon_ra... "Loss Rate". I do believe that there are good and bad NGOs acting there. There are even registered cases https://www.dw.com/pt-br/membros-de-ong-s%C3%A3o-presos-na-amaz%C3%B4nia/a-51430158 https://www.dw.com/pt-br/membros-de-ong-s%C3%A3o-presos-na-a... I couldn't find the text in German or English, but "Deutsche Welle" isn't exactly pro-bolsonaro. EDIT, found one article from "The Guardian" https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/nov/26/brazil-police-raid-ngo-office-amazon-wildfires https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/nov/26/brazil-police-...
hikerclimb 6y ago
I hope amazes n collapse

158 points by billyharris 6y ago

I can only assume this is astro-turfing. The Amazon is near a tipping point of total destruction - https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-00508-4 https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-00508-4 If your pants are on fire and you piss in them, you don't say "look how wet your pants are getting".

caiob 6y ago
Despite what these “studies” say, the Amazon is NOT near a tipping point of destruction. In fact, it’s not even close. These publications fail to disclose that these fires are seasonal and will continue to happen without man-interference. These so-called protection of the Amazon is part of an agenda rich countries have to keep Brazil uncompetitive. How about we start rebuilding green space in Western Europe? How about we start planting more trees in southern California?
- neuronic 6y ago
  I am going to go ahead and put more credibility into peer-reviewed research in Nature than some random HN comment without sources.
  - gus_massa 6y ago
    The link is no not a peer-reviewed research in Nature, it is a "News Feature" written by "a science writer based in Manaus, Brazil." The cites for the tipping point are two editorials written by the same team of two researches in Science Advances, these are editorials, not research articles. They cite https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1029/2007GL030612 https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1029/200... that is a peer-reviewed research article in Geophysical Research Letters. The research article claims that with a 40% deforestation the rain reduction will cause problems, but in the editorial they use hand waving to reduce that to 20%.
antisthenes 6y ago
I think this is the most telling tidbit, right at the top of the article: > According to their findings, 12% of total carbon emissions from Amazon deforestation have been offset by Brazil’s secondary forests, making natural regrowth an underestimated tool for mitigating global carbon emissions and regional ecosystem collapse. 12% of carbon offset is better than 0, but still catastrophically low. Just means the the destruction of the Amazon rainforest is just slightly slower than previously thought.
- rorykoehler 6y ago
  I'm more worried about bio-diversity loss than carbon offset tbh. This is purposefully framing the issue in a way to steer the conversation away from what really matters.
  - eecc 6y ago
    Purposefully? That’s a charged accusation, can you substantiate it?
  - brutusborn 6y ago
    And "really matters" is just an opinion. Can you say why carbon offset doesn't really matter or why bio-diversity loss really does? I'm genuinely curious.
    - danielheath 6y ago
      We are currently extinguishing biodiversity at a rate close to 100k years per year (that is, recovery-via-evolution of the biodiversity lost in any recent year will take 100k years). Some of that biodiversity isn’t load-bearing (that is, we can do fine without it), but some of it is and we will be paying for it’s loss essentially-forever.
    - Rexxar 6y ago
      Carbon offset can be done somewhere else or later, biodiversity is lost forever.
    - 6y ago
jillesvangurp 6y ago
Not necessarily; fatalism never solves any problems. The article just highlights that historically the problem has been ignorance. We treat the Amazon as this vast ocean of un-mapped green where all sorts of people can hide; entire tribes of native Americans reside there that have had little or no contact with the modern world. We simply don't know what is going on there in very large detail. Well, thanks to modern mapping, now we do. Formerly easy to hide and illegal activity like burning a bit of forest to get some farm land now stands out and we can track what happens or happened to bits of land. That's basically what the article is pointing out is actually happening. A few bits of information in there: - Forest regeneration is slow but significant; up to 40% of forest thought to be lost over the past decades has in fact regrown. It's a slow process that takes up to 4 decades to fully restore bio diversity. But it's possible and happening at pretty significant scale. - The whole process is basically driven by poor land management, ignorance, and incompetence. Farmers mismanage their soil, thus exhausting it and then burn more forest to solve their problem while abandoning their old land, which then starts regenerating if left alone. - Mapping provides authorities better insight where this is happening or has happened and allows them to step up attempts to crack down on this to both protect regrowing forest and put a stop to new attempts to burn forests. Simply scaling up that effort could go a long way to fixing the problem. Farming by its very nature is very local. If authorities show up within weeks of you burning a forest to start growing stuff, it gets a lot more risky. Burning forest is the lazy option; it's only convenient if you can get away with it. Mapping can fix that.
- thaumasiotes 6y ago
  > fatalism never solves any problems Fatalism solves problems of resource misallocation. You're better off putting in the effort to solve problems you can solve than putting in the effort to solve problems you can't solve. Assuming there's a limited amount of effort, fatalism will help you.
- mschuster91 6y ago
  > If authorities show up within weeks of you burning a forest to start growing stuff, it gets a lot more risky. Burning forest is the lazy option; it's only convenient if you can get away with it. Mapping can fix that. Mapping doesn't do shit if the politicians don't act - and Bolsonaro is hellbent on not acting in the interest of anyone but the rich people paying him off (https://www.bbc.com/news/world-latin-america-49815731 https://www.bbc.com/news/world-latin-america-49815731). If the rainforest is to be saved, Bolsonaro must be removed one way or the other - and I'm not sure that it will be possible at all to remove that guy at the voting booth anymore. Personally I'd welcome some sort of intervention by one of the three-letter agencies - this time it could be actually for a good cause.

paganel 6y ago

This won't work unless we, as a species, cut out on meat (beaf+pork) consumption and also smaller houses/apartments would help (that would mean less need for furniture, i.e. less need for cutting down trees). No-one is going down in the Amazon to cut down trees just for the heck of it or because they are Bolsonaro's croons, they're doing it because there are very strong economic incentives to do it.

ajot 6y ago
I always find funny how first world citizens don't want the Amazon being (ab)used, or dislike the palm oil industry, but still want to keep and develop their own agricultural lands AND their living standards.
- zorked 6y ago
  I'm a reasonably hardcore environmentalist but this is true. There will be many armchair experts here suggesting that stuff should be done in Brazil but they never propose things like "let's shut down New York for two months per year", or "let's impose mileage quotas on North American vehicles" or "let's reduce German manufacturing by 50%".
  - Erlich_Bachman 6y ago
    Because none of those things are going to happen and it would hurt a lot of people in a lot of ways if they would.
    - ajot 6y ago
      Living in an economically underdeveloped country also hurts a lot of people in a lot of ways. Why not buffer this suffering with the whole world?
    - pelasaco 6y ago
      Brazil has a population of 200 million people. Is that a lot of people?

rmsaksida 6y ago

The only fair way to curb the deforestation of the Amazon is to make the economic incentive of not cutting it down greater than the incentive of cutting it down. In other words, Brazil needs to be compensated for not utilizing its natural resources. The majority of Western countries exhausted their natural resources (including forests) for economic gain and have no right to point fingers at Brazil, especially when they buy meat and soya from Brazil. It's important to note that Brazil has more preserved nature and a smaller carbon footprint than most - all? - countries that criticize it. I'm all for preserving the Amazon but the entitlement and double standards that surface in discussions about this subject are ridiculous.

morceauxdebois 6y ago
Should the US compensate China so they don't exterminate the Uigurs, they got to cleanse a whole continent of indigenous people.
- farias0 6y ago
  Are they interested in keeping the Ulgurs alive?
- pelasaco 6y ago
  The interesting discussion would be about the indigenous people (Native people so to speak) in Germany and France claiming back land exactly as we Germans try to enforce in Brazil and US.
  - delecti 6y ago
    There are German and French indigenous? Do you have any more info? I'm super curious to learn more, but I'm not sure what search to start with.
    - pelasaco 6y ago
      Well Indigenous are nothing else than Native people. Or how do you define Indigenous? You could start with a dictionary ;) From Oxford Dictionary: originating or occurring naturally in a particular place; native. "the indigenous peoples of Siberia" Beside it you have for sure groups like Sorbs and Danes[2] References: [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indigenous_peoples https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indigenous_peoples [2]: https://www.refworld.org/docid/4954ce03c.html https://www.refworld.org/docid/4954ce03c.html [3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Germans#:~:text=The%20migration%2Dperiod%20peoples%20who,the%20formation%20of%20the%20Germans https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Germans#:~:text=The%20migratio....

lanevorockz 6y ago

De-Florestation in Brazil was really hard to curb. A lot of it is caused by fake benevolence. A good example NGOs that take money to protect the amazon, the process goes like this : raise money / buy land / cut 70% of the land / replant / advertise the replanting / repeat ... It is completely legal and the environmentalists are in favour of that. At some point they might own the whole thing. Problem is that this is the cause of the fires, these new replanted forests are nowhere as dense and humid as the new quick raising ones. Current Government did two things, relaxed on releasing the amazon satellite data and curbed down the 70% allowance to 30%. That might make it less profitable for the NGOs and maybe the reason they only recently double down on the rhetoric.

robotbikes 6y ago
This is a pretty big claim, or that NGOs cut down 70% of the land they buy. Do you have any links that contain news or evidence that this practice is widespread and the allowance change ?
- zorked 6y ago
  This is a conspiracy theory supported by Bolsonaro and his supporters. In reality NGOs active in the Amazon are more likely to live under death threats and barely have any funding at all for even basic activities.
  - pelasaco 6y ago
    As you put looks like the Amazon before was well protected. Just look the data https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deforestation_of_the_Amazon_rainforest https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deforestation_of_the_Amazon_ra... "Loss Rate". I do believe that there are good and bad NGOs acting there. There are even registered cases https://www.dw.com/pt-br/membros-de-ong-s%C3%A3o-presos-na-amaz%C3%B4nia/a-51430158 https://www.dw.com/pt-br/membros-de-ong-s%C3%A3o-presos-na-a... I couldn't find the text in German or English, but "Deutsche Welle" isn't exactly pro-bolsonaro. EDIT, found one article from "The Guardian" https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/nov/26/brazil-police-raid-ngo-office-amazon-wildfires https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/nov/26/brazil-police-...

hikerclimb 6y ago

I hope amazes n collapse