Thomas E. Lovejoy has spent over four decades studying the Amazon rainforest. He says Brazil must act now to protect this “rain machine,” which is essential to the country’s agriculture and hydropower.
 | Thomas E. Lovejoy, President, Heinz Center for Science, Economics and the Environment"Whether the government cares about the rainforest as carbon, as forest, or as biodiversity, it needs that rain for massive agriculture enterprises and hydroelectric facilities" |
You have been doing work in the Brazilian Amazon since the 1960s. How did it look back then?
I showed up there as a graduate student in 1965. Believe it or not, in the entire Amazon there was one road and three million people.
But Brazil has since built more roads that cut through the rainforests. What are the consequences?
The history of those roads is that deforestation follows. It is not one-hundred-percent inevitable, but there has to be a whole different approach taken. One of the biggest states in Brazil, Amazonas, which is three times the size of Texas, is working actively to manage and avoid that spontaneous colonization. If you have an enlightened government, you can manage that to some extent.
What do you mean by an enlightened government?
Eduardo Bragas, the governor of Amazonas, basically understands that the future of the state is much better if it remains a forest, so he's looking at ways to make that possible.
He's being very creative in looking at ecosystem services and the ability to get into carbon markets, and having some of that money feed back into the local communities so that they have an incentive to actually think of development of the forest - not after you've already removed it.
And here is one of the interesting things that's not really well-known now: an important percentage of the rainfall south of the Amazon - in Mato Grosso and Sao Paulo state - comes from the Amazon.
The Amazon rainforest is, in fact, a rain machine. Whether the government cares about the rainforest as carbon, as forest, or as biodiversity, they need that rain for their massive agriculture enterprise and hydroelectric facilities. So, there's sort of a double reason why Brazil should engage in carbon markets for avoided deforestation.
And has the Brazilian government already shown interest in avoided deforestation to boost its participation in the carbon market?
Brazil has opened the door to that. I'm trying to show that it's really in their interest, whether they care about the forest or not; that they need the rain machine. The only way they're going to be able to get deforestation stopped is if they have that kind of income streaming in.
In the meantime, they've been fairly successful in the last two years in cutting the deforestation rate in half. How vulnerable that is to economic considerations is an open question.
How close is the Amazon is to reaching its climate change threshold, the point beyond which the ecosystem will start to collapse and self-destruct?
Nobody knows where the threshold is. I believe that it cannot be that far away. Perhaps more importantly, I believe that it just makes no sense to find out where the threshold is by passing it.
But I think the important thing to recognize is that deforestation is not the only thing that will affect the rain machine. There are at least two other factors - El Nino and Atlantic circulation - and if you have all three at the same time, it could be a synergistic nightmare. The degradation of the hydrological cycle may even already be starting. It is hard to tell what the early stages look like.
Will these dangers help make Brazil a leader on the international climate change stage?
In many ways, Brazil is already a keystone country. First of all, they are an important country in the developing nation bloc. They and India and China are the three biggest. So, if Brazil begins to shift - and this is in their interest - it could actually influence the rest. They've been very creative about biofuels for thirty years. That's only part of the solution, but nonetheless important.
editor: Valdis Wish
publishing date: September 10, 2007
latest update: July 21, 2009
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