Page 13 - MONTT LATIN AMERICAN MAGAZINE, AUGUST 2021 (English)

• Hurricanes reached Category 4 intensity and made landfall in the same Region in rapid succession.
• Marine life, coastal ecosystems and the human communities that depend on them, particularly in small island developing States, face increasing threats from ocean acidi cation, rising sea levels, warming of the water and a greater intensity and frequency of tropical storms.
“All these changes indicated in the report are a red code for Humanity,” said Antonio Guterres, Secretary General of the United Nations, UN, who assured that the viability of our societies depends on the actions of governments, companies and citizens to limit the temperature rise to 1,5 degrees. “The alarms are deafening and the evidence is irrefutable: greenhouse gas emissions from the burning of fossil fuels and deforestation are su ocating our planet and putting billions of people at immediate risk. Global warming is a ecting all regions of the Earth, and many of the changes are becoming irreversible, ”he said.
For his part, Alok Sharma, president of the decisive World Climate Summit that will take place next November in Glasgow (COP26), said that “the next decade is decisive.” “The science is clear, the impacts of the climate crisis can be seen around the world and if we do not act now, we will continue to see the worst e ects impact on lives and natural habitats.”
The situation today is very serious, to the point that one of the researchers in the report, Carolina Vera, argues that many changes motivated by past emissions will already be “irreversible for centuries or millennia”, especially those that a ect the oceans and layers of ice. The worst thing is that: “They will continue for hundreds or thousands of years, but they can be slowed down if emissions are reduced.” For example, the sea level is expected to continue to rise during this century. Between 1901 and 2018, the increase was about 20 centimetres. And, taking as a reference the level of the period between 1995 and 2014, by 2100 the rise could be 40 centimetres in the most optimistic emissions scenario; in the most pessimistic it would double, to exceed 80 centimetres. This will contribute to “more frequent and severe coastal ooding in low-lying areas and erosion” of the coast. “Extreme sea level events that previously occurred once every 100 years could happen every year by the end of this
century,” he explains.
Fires and Droughts
According to experts, much of the responsibility of some of these situations falls on Brazil, which allowed deforestation in more than 30 percent of the Amazons, a region that now emits up to 10 times more carbon than it should, which prevents rains throughout the Region. For example, the illegal logging of trees in the tropical forest reached a record for the last 12 years in 2020 with the loss of 11,000 square kilometres, 9,5 percent more than the previous year. Thus, Brazil, the main Latin American economy, su ers and generates with its ecological behaviour the worst drought in the entire subcontinent in almost a century. At the local level, the sharp drop in water supply to hydroelectric plants is severely a ecting electricity generation, raising prices to levels never seen in the past and causing serious damage to family economies.
The problem for analysts is that Brazil exports its climatic e ects to the entire planet, especially to the countries that live nearby.
According to Luciana Gatti, analyst at the National Institute for Space Research (INPE): “The Amazon is our climate security. It is a huge body of vegetation releasing water into the atmosphere and thereby helping to increase rainfall and attenuate the global increase in temperatures ”, she explains. That is why the preservation of that territory has e ects far beyond the borders of Brazil”. Agribusiness, one of the most important engines of the economy of that country, expanded in recent decades at the expense of the original vegetation and is now among the rst to su er the impact of the drought, to the point that 40 percent of arable land is su ering from this scourge, with unusual rises in the price of food and the spectre of hunger surrounding various human populations.
Even so, a few weeks ago, the Constitution, Justice and Citizenship Commission of the Chamber of Deputies of that country approved by 40 votes to 21 the so-called Bill 490/2007, considered as the greatest attack on the Amazon rainforest and to the native peoples never done, since if the tropical forest disappears it will be impossible to control global overheating. In the rst two years of the Bolsonaro government,
deforestation in the Amazon increased by almost 48 percent in protected areas. For that reason, international investment in Brazil plummets: not even the staunchest capitalist wants to be identified with the collapse of life on Earth, warn the opponents of this law.
International financiers criticize that the Brazilian government weakened inspections on the ground to prevent abuse of the territory; it encouraged encroachment on public lands— even those formally protected by law— and allowed predators, loggers, and miners to literally pillage the area. If the bill is approved in its entirety in the Senate, it will totally repeal indigenous rights and legally allow the predatory exploitation of the Amazon rainforest and other biomes.
But it is not the only problem in Brazil: the country lost one sixth of its areas covered with fresh water in three decades, an indicator that, according to experts, shows that the main water reserve in the world “is drying up”, especially Pantanal, a gigantic wetland, recognized as a World Heritage Site by Unesco and considered one of the richest ecosystems in the world in biodiversity of ora and fauna, shared by Brazil, Bolivia and Paraguay, of 250,000 square kilometres of extension, where 60 per cent is in Brazilian territory.
The biome recorded its largest surface water extension in 1988 (2 million hectares), but in 2020 the area only totalled 458,903, which is a gigantic reduction. The freshwater surface in the wetland can be further reduced if they continue the devastation of the vegetation in its headwaters, the agricultural practices of the bordering regions and if the green light is given for a hundred hydroelectric plants that want to rise in the rivers. The lost waters are equivalent to an area the size of Belgium.
The Parana and the Glaciers from Colombia
Brazil is not the only country with this problem. Argentina has just declared a “state of water emergency” in the Parana River, considered the third largest freshwater reserve in the world, with an approximate area of one million 194,000 square kilometres located in the lower part of Brazil, Argentina, Uru cool and Paraguay. Through Parana, 80 percent of the country’s exports and agro-industrial products, a key
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State of the Climate in Latin America
Parana River