First off, the fires are burning in Brazil’s Amazon. They are prompting international outcry. It is a classic example of a “chronic emergency”. So thank you Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro and as they say in New Jersey, Have A Nice Day! Yet FOLKS!! More or just as importantly Africa has twice as many fires right now!
This is after the entire world from the public to international NGO’s. All acknowledged he Brazilian Government is ill-equipped to battle the flames. So soon after we called him out, Brazil’s armed services assist in the fight. But to truly address the situation, we need more systemic, long-term strategy. A strategy therefore of prevention. One that thereby feeds into a broader regional development plan. Because the current focus is on the Amazon fire within Brazil. Therefore the African fires are getting little international attention.
However, it clearly opens an opportunity to make that shift I’ve been looking for. One to postpone or even avoid what scientists refer to as the Amazon forest “tipping point”. Whereby the forest is no longer able to sustain itself. That’s not true and another post will explain that even further.
Yet and most importantly Africa is burning too and nobody is talking about it!
Good news is the past two years have seen rapid progress. Progress in the emergence of norms and best practices. Thereby for setting and implementing commitments to eliminate deforestation. An ecosystem conversion and ending human rights abuses from supply chains. So the deforestation is caused by agriculture. There is also a proliferation of tools to evaluate a companies progress and performance.
Tropical deforestation accelerates climate change. Therefore 40 percent of it happens in two countries: Brazil and Indonesia. Governments, NGOs, and businesses, meanwhile, have launched dozens of efforts to correct this. Yet clearly those efforts will only succeed if Countries work together. Here’s how to make that happen.
Yet we have also learned Africa is in serious trouble and seems a lot worse than the Amazon. Similarly, Stephen Donofrio, Founder and Partner at GreenPoint Innovations in Brooklyn commented on this. He is a Senior Advisor for Forest Trends in Washington D.C.. Stephen has 15 years’ experience working broadly across the climate services landscape. That’s first off including starting his career as an economist at the Chicago Climate Exchange (CCX). Then working with the Carbon Disclosure Project. Stephen is familiar with a lot of the policy ins and outs of the Brazilian rainforest.
That’s including why these fires may be incredibly difficult to put out. They will cause serious harm to the global eco-system. So we need to fight these fires at the source: agriculture.
Stephen and Forest Trends also developed a film a few years ago on Stewards of the Forest, links below.
As Stephen says about the Amazon.
A lot of these fires are economically driven by agriculture. Forest Trends supply change initiative (www.supply-change.org), which tracks corporations who have set public goals to address such commodity driven deforestation, has a lot of info on similar situations around the world. The sad reality is, corporate ambition only can be successful with government policies that can complement that ambition, as long as of course that those government policies are upheld, which in Brazil right now government is a real problem.”
Full Full, https://vimeo.com/
As the Guardian Reports:
Brazil’s far-right president, Jair Bolsonaro, has professed to feeling “profound love and respect” for the Amazon. All as fires continued to rage in the world’s biggest tropical rainforest and criticism of his environmental policies intensified.
In a televised address to the nation with pot-banging protests in several Brazilian cities at the same time. So Bolsonaro said he was “not content” with the situation in the Amazon. Finally he is taking “firm action” to resolve it. All by deploying troops to the region.
So the Amazon state of Acre became the latest to declare a state of emergency because of the wildfires.
Yet I Know Have Been at the Amazon Please Don’t forget Africa too!
So as we defend the Forest fires tearing through the Amazon rainforest think of Africa too. Because one forest is prompting worldwide protests and demands. All for action to protect the “lungs of the world.” However NASA shows the Brazilian fires are dwarfing blazes in Africa.
Finally, the fires are so visible from space. In conclusion, the fires are currently burning up the Amazon rainforest at a rate of three football fields per minute. That’s according to Brazilian satellite data. Brazil’s National Institute for Space Research.
They reported an 83 percent increase in wildfires on last year. That’s with more than 72,000 fires spotted, 9,000 last week alone.
Most noteworthy and in Africa, it’s difficult to know what’s happening. As RT reports: there no news reports on the fires in Angola. As well as the fires surfacing in the west. No hashtag campaigns or mass demonstrations have broken out, and the issue has not been placed on the G7 leaders’ agenda. Yet AfricanNews.com reporting:
A lot of international attention has been on the devastating effects of fires rampaging through the Amazon rain forest in Brazil. Most noteworthy, the place is known as one of the lungs of the earth is burning along with the Congo Basin in Africa.
While governments across the world from the United Nations and environmental conservation groups continue to pile pressure on Brazil, authorities are combating the fire. That’s from records by United States authorities. They are indicating that two African countries were suffering more fire outbreaks than Brazil was.
Most interestingly, Weather Source recording 6,902 fires in Angola. That’s over the past 48 hours. More noteworthy, that’s compared to 3,395 in the Democratic Republic of Congo and 2,127 in Brazil. So interestingly though It’s not an uncommon phenomenon for Central Africa but this is nuts!
Finally and most interestingly, NASA, operates the MODIS satellite data. It’s tracking the fires and they said most incidents are caused by farmers. All as a result attempting to cite “burning to clear their farmlands.”
