Expert: COVID, climate change create ‘perfect storm’ for Amazon fires

To prevent irreversible harm to the climate that supports us, humanity must emit less climate-warming greenhouse gases while also removing excess carbon from the atmosphere. But even if the world instantly stopped using fossil fuels, we would fail to avert a disastrous climate scenario if we did not also reverse the destruction of ecosystems that absorb and store carbon.

In other words: If we don’t protect and restore nature, we won’t save the climate.

The facts

Natural climate solutions are at the heart of Conservation International’s work. These are actions that conserve, restore or improve the use or management of ecosystems while maintaining their capacity to absorb and store carbon from the atmosphere. These solutions also provide a host of additional benefits — filtering fresh water, providing breathable air — that other approaches to climate change don’t offer.

Even better: Nature can do this today — cost-effectively, and at the massive scale required.

Planetary goals

Where humanity needs to be by 2030

Scientists have identified the global need to avoid 5 gigatons of carbon dioxide (CO₂) emissions per year by preventing the destruction of high-carbon ecosystems, and to remove 5 additional gigatons of CO₂ per year through the restoration and sustainable management of the landscapes that serve as Earth’s natural “carbon sinks” by 2030.

What we are doing about it

Our strategy focuses on ensuring that natural ecosystems are worth more alive than dead. Deforestation rates have climbed in recent years — with short-term economic interests outweighing the long-term value of forests. Conservation International’s work aims to replace an extractive economy with a regenerative one through innovation, collaboration and by partnering with Indigenous peoples and local communities.

Together, we are:

Working with businesses and governments to minimize deforestation by addressing its largest drivers, particularly agricultural expansion.
Identifying and mapping high-carbon ecosystems such as mangroves, tropical peatlands and old-growth tropical forests that, once lost, are extraordinarily difficult to replace.
Guiding public and private investments to initiatives such as REDD+ (Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and forest Degradation), a UN-backed approach to fight climate change by conserving forests.
Developing methods to increase the return on investment in tropical reforestation, making it more attractive for governments and private investors.
Supporting local and Indigenous communities to protect forests on their lands.
Mainstreaming and maximizing nature’s role for achieving climate goals in national and international climate actions.

MORE THAN 30%

Protecting and restoring tropical forests can make up at least 30% of the solution to the climate crisis. But forest-protection efforts receive only 3% of global climate funding. Join the thousands of people who want to fix that.

Conservation International aims to:

Avoid 2+ gigatons of CO₂ emissions through the avoided loss and conservation of high-carbon ecosystems such as peat, mangroves and old-growth forests. This will require preventing the loss of 3.3 million hectares of forest and protecting a much larger area.

Remove another 1+ gigaton of CO₂ through restoration and sustainable management of natural ecosystems by 2025. That will require the restoration of 35 million hectares of land.

Secure 13 percent of the ecosystems that are storing the planet’s “irrecoverable carbon” — approximately 400 million hectares. These critical ecosystems contain carbon that if emitted, could not be recovered by nature in time.

Ensure all mangroves are included in countries’ climate action commitments and are protected and/or covered under a sustainable financing mechanism, with the aim of increasing mangrove forests worldwide by 20 percent by 2030.

Help at least 30 countries enact policies that maximize natural climate solution potential.

Develop projects to capture 200 megatons of CO₂ and increase available financing for natural climate solutions by US$ 10 billion.

Directly support at least 3 million people from climate-vulnerable communities to adapt to the impacts of climate change through nature-based approaches that protect, manage and restore the nature that they and future generations depend on.

Principles for Investments in Natural Climate Solutions

Nature is one of the most effective ways to stop climate breakdown, yet natural climate solutions receive less than 3 percent of all global climate funding. Conservation International’s Principles for Investments in Natural Climate Solutions guide our engagement with companies that are helping to protect ecosystems that store climate-warming carbon from the atmosphere. Read our six principles »

Irrecoverable Carbon

To avoid the catastrophic consequences of climate breakdown, there are certain places that humanity simply cannot afford to destroy. These ecosystems contain more than 260 billion tons of “irrecoverable carbon,” most of which is stored in mangroves, peatlands, old-growth forests and marshes. If released, these vast stores of living carbon would be impossible to recover by the middle of the century, which is when the world needs to reach net-zero emissions to avoid a climate disaster.

Conservation International scientists are leading a team of globally renowned experts to determine where these carbon stocks are, whether they are threatened by human activities and how quickly the stocks could be recovered if lost — creating a global map of irrecoverable carbon in Earth’s ecosystems.

Informed by this pioneering research, Conservation International is undertaking an ambitious initiative to protect 120 million hectares (nearly 300 million acres) of ecosystems — an area larger than Colombia — containing high amounts of irrecoverable carbon by 2025.

On the ground

Conservation International is hard at work

Chyulu Hills, Kenya

Conservation International is working to restore tens of thousands of hectares of grasslands in Kenya’s Chyulu Hills, which will protect wildlife, support the livelihoods of the Maasai people and remove carbon from the atmosphere. By scaling this cost-effective approach, up to 900 million hectares (2.2 billion acres) of degraded shrublands and grasslands could be restored to natural savanna, benefiting people and wildlife, and potentially sequestering billions of tons of carbon dioxide each year.

Alto Mayo, Peru

Despite its protected status, Peru’s Alto Mayo Protected Forest — a swath of Amazonian rainforest twice the size of New York City — has seen some of the country’s highest rates of deforestation, fueled by agriculture and illegal logging. Conservation International is helping to provide local farmers with economic alternatives to deforestation, as well as benefits such as agricultural training, improved cookstoves and educational materials. These agreements have been partially funded through carbon credits, a critical tool for reducing deforestation and supporting sustainable development.

Bajo Madidi Municipal Conservation and Management Area, Bolivia

A critical part of Conservation International’s climate strategy is centered around increasing the protection of carbon-rich forests in the Amazon — benefiting nature, climate and communities. With support from Conservation International, the Bolivian municipality of Ixiamas established the 1.5 million-hectare (3.7 million-acre) Bajo Madidi Municipal Conservation and Management Area.

Cispatá, Colombia

Along the northern edge of Colombia’s Caribbean coast, Conservation International is directly preventing the loss of 9,600 hectares (nearly 24,000 acres) of mangrove forests and actively restoring an additional 1,800 hectares (about 4,500 acres). Some mangrove forests store more carbon per unit area than any other ecosystem on Earth while protecting coastal communities from the devastating impacts of climate change, including sea-level rise and severe storms.

Related conservation news from the field

Expert: COVID, climate change create ‘perfect storm’ for Amazon fires

Jul 7, 2020, 15:08 PM by Kiley Price

A year after unprecedented fires ravaged the Amazon, the latest data indicate the world’s largest rainforest faces an even higher risk of fires in 2020.

Drier than average conditions — exacerbated by climate change — and the COVID-19 pandemic have created what one expert calls “a perfect storm.”

“Predicting the fire season is not straightforward,” said Karyn Tabor, senior director of ecological monitoring at Conservation International, in a recent statement. “Fire season in the Amazon is influenced by ecological, climatic, social, cultural and economic factors … from sea surface temperatures that influence rainfall in South America, to commodity-driven deforestation and the COVID-19 pandemic.”

With insight from satellite data and reports from the field, Tabor and her team project a particularly intense — and potentially devastating — fire season across the region.

Deforestation, COVID-19 and fires

Deforestation in the tropics has surged since COVID-19 restrictions went into effect, according to recent reports from Conservation International field offices. Evidence suggests that the majority of these activities were enabled by weakened enforcement efforts that people exploited — some driven by desperation for food and income, others by profit.

Regardless of the motivation, the destruction of these tropical forests could have devastating consequences for countries across the Amazon Basin as fire season approaches.

Data derived from Firecast — a tool developed by Conservation International to track and predict forest fires in tropical countries — found that more of the Amazon fires in 2019 occurred in places that had been completely or partially deforested, which dried these areas and enabled faster burning.

“There is no doubt that climate change and deforestation are intensifying fire seasons in the Amazon and elsewhere in ways that negatively impact livelihoods and the environment,” Tabor said.

Rather than decreasing deforestation in preparation for this fire season, however, many governments are actually easing anti-deforestation laws amid the pandemic, she added.

“Some governments have used widespread focus on the pandemic to quietly roll back environmental protections designed to prevent deforestation which in turn fuels the capacity for future fires to take hold.”

READ MORE: Expert: Rollbacks of environmental protections imperil nature — and human health

‘Uncontrolled spread’

Burning land to clear space for agriculture is a common farming practice in the Amazon. As climate change accelerates and conditions become drier, however, these small, controlled burns can too easily escalate into uncontrollable infernos, Tabor said.

“We are seeing warmer than average Atlantic sea surface temperatures just north of the equator, which usually indicates a drier-than-average fire season in the western Amazon,” she explained. “Drier conditions do not mean there will be more fires in number but indicate that there will be more area burned due to fire size and the increased risk of uncontrolled spread."

These drier conditions stand to have the greatest impact on Peru and Bolivia during the 2020 fire season, as well as the Brazilian Amazon states of Amazonas and Maranhão, according to Firecast and data from NASA.

Driven by climate change, high temperatures mixed with drier conditions could have potentially dire consequences for the health and livelihoods of people who live in these areas, especially Indigenous peoples.

“As we approach the time for annual agricultural burning, the monitoring and tracking risk of uncontrolled fire spread remains imperative for the safety of all people in the region. Everyone suffers from these fires, from the people living and working in urban economic centers compromised by smoke pollution to rural indigenous communities,” Tabor said.

“In many regions it is expected that fires will impact Indigenous peoples who are already struggling to battle the health impacts of COVID-19. Increased smoke will exacerbate respiratory issues caused by the virus, and forest destruction will affect intact forests, farming land, livestock and other resources these communities rely on to survive.”

Karyn Tabor is the senior director of ecological monitoring at Conservation International. Kiley Price is a staff writer at Conservation International. Want to read more stories like this? Sign up for email updates here. Donate to Conservation International here.

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