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The Amazon Cannot Be Recovered Once It’s Gone Published in the Atlantic, August 24, 2019 The Amazon is burning. There have been more than 74,000 fires across Brazil this year, and nearly 40,000 fires...

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The Amazon Cannot Be Recovered Once It’s Gone
Published in the Atlantic, August 24, 2019
The Amazon is burning. There have been more than 74,000 fires across Brazil this year, and nearly 40,000 fires across the Amazon, according to Brazil’s National Institute for Space Research. That’s the fastest rate of burning since record-keeping began, in 2013. Toxic smoke from the fires is so intense that darkness now falls hours before the sun sets in São Paulo, Brazil’s financial capital and the largest city in the Western Hemisphere.
The fires have captured the planet’s attention as little else does. The Amazon is the world’s largest and most diverse tract of rainforest, with millions of species and billions of trees. It stores vast amounts of planet-warming ca
on dioxide and produces 6 percent of the planet’s oxygen.
So the Amazonian fires—which have been blazing for weeks and notoriously received less coverage than Notre Dame’s burning roof— seem like a potent symbol of humanity’s indifference to environmental disorder, including climate change.
But climate change is not the primary cause of the wildfires. Unlike, say, most California blazes—which are sparked by accident and then intensified by climate change—the Amazonian fires are not wildfires at all. These fires did not start by lightning strike or power line: They were ignited. And while they largely affect land already cleared for ranching and farming, they can and do spread into old-growth forest.
So the two scariest numbers for understanding the fires are this: There are 80 percent more fires this year than there were last summer, according to the Brazilian government. This surge in burning has accompanied a spike in deforestation in general. More than 1,330 square miles of the Amazon rainforest have been lost since January, a 39 percent increase over the same period last year, according to The New York Times.
Why are these figures so important? Because Brazil’s political leadership has changed in the past year. On January 1, Jair Bolsonaro, a far-right populist who has openly pined for his country’s authoritarian past, was sworn in as president. During his campaign, he promised to weaken the Amazon’s environmental protections—which have been effective at reducing deforestation for the past two decades—and open up the rainforest to economic development.
Now he is making good on that promise. The three Brazilian states with the worst spikes in fire this year are all governed by Bolsonaro’s allies, according to Richard Black, a former BBC journalist and the cu
ent director of the nonprofit Energy and Climate Intelligence Unit. The states governed by Bolsonaro’s political opponents have actually seen a decline in fires. And according to allegations by the global news site OpenDemocracy, leaked documents show that Bolsonaro’s government intends to strategically prevent conservation projects in the Amazon.
But recognizing that the fires are a political problem as well as an environmental one does not make solving them any easier. Bolsonaro has found success in part by casting himself in opposition to the rich global North. When asked about the fires, he implied that environmental NGOs were behind the burning. After President Emmanuel Macron of France called the fires a crisis, tweeting that “our house is burning,” Bolsonaro co-opted his words, accusing him of a “misplaced colonial mindset.”
That cynical attack points to the difficulty of a remedy. The Amazon rainforest does, in some sense, belong to Brazilians and the indigenous people who live there. But as a store of ca
on, it is fundamental to the survival of every person. If destroyed or degraded, the Amazon, as a system, is simply beyond humanity’s ability to get back: Even if people were to replant half a continent’s worth of trees, the diversity of creatures across Amazonia, once lost, will not be replenished for roughly 10 million years. And that is 33 times longer than Homo sapiens, as a species, has existed.
The Success of Paying People to Not Cut Down Trees
Published in the Atlantic, July 20, 2017
The world’s tropical forests are living exemplars of the tragedy of the commons, where the needs of the world clash with those of individuals. The trees in those forests lock away so much ca
on that keeping them alive is one of the most cost-effective ways of reducing global ca
on-dioxide emissions and forestalling the harm of climate change. But for the people who actually own those trees, cutting them down, selling them for timber, and using their land for agriculture is a great way of making money and feeding families.
Most deforestation occurs in low-income countries. So one way of resolving these misaligned interests is for rich countries, or international funders like the World Bank, to pay people in poor countries not to chop down trees, creating an incentive to protect their forests. This approach is known as “payment for ecosystem services,” or PES. Back in 1997, Costa Rica became the first country to try it at a national scale. Since then, Mexico, China, Bolivia, and other nations have followed suit.
Still, the approach is controversial. Does it actually work? Is it cost-effective? Are the people who take the money those who were already treating their forests well? And do they simply shift their tree-cutting activities to other nea
y land? Essentially, “how do you know that you really slow down deforestation?” asks Seema Jayachandran, from Northwestern University.
To answer that question, Jayachandran and her colleagues traveled to western Uganda, whose forests are home to chimpanzees and gorillas, and whose deforestation rates are the third highest in the world. In 2011, they selected 121 villages and offered a PES scheme to half of them, chosen at random. This experiment marks the first time the approach has ever been tested in a randomized trial, and its results were encouraging. Over two years, the program managed to halve the amount of fallen forest near the villages that participated in the scheme, compared to those that didn’t.
The program was also cheap and cost-effective. It took just $20,350 to pay all the enrollees, who (on average) bolstered their annual income by $56 a year—around 10 to 20 percent. “That’s the magic of the program,” says Jayachandran. “It’s enough money that there are financial pressures to not cut the forest, but cheap enough that wealthy countries can pay for it.”
“Sometimes, people ask why the government doesn’t just buy up the forests and make them into reserves,” she adds. “But people have their homes there. They’re integrated with the forests, so you have to figure out a way to let people live their lives.”
Other scientists found similar results when evaluating Mexico’s PES program after it had launched: There, payments also halved the loss of tree cover. “It is immensely useful to know that those results hold up in a fully randomized setting” and in a different continent, says Jennifer Alix-Garcia from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, who was involved in the Mexico analysis. “It suggests the existence of an effective environmental policy that can be applied in challenging institutional settings without adverse effects on households. What could be better?”
“I’m happy to see PES getting increased attention,” adds Katharine Sims from Amherst College, who was also involved in the Mexico study. “It has emerged as a key strategy for global forest conservation [and ] provide an important way of better aligning individual and social values.”
A local non-profit—the Chimpanzee Sanctuary and Wildlife Conservation Trust—designed and administered the program. Its staff traveled to the targeted villages, talked to their leaders, and offered them a contract that fo
ade them from cutting down mature trees, in exchange for an annual payment of $28 per pristine hectare. If they agreed, the team did on-the-ground spot-checks to make sure that that they were holding up their end of the deal, and assessed any differences in tree cover using satellite images.
On average, the team found that tree cover fell by 4.2 percent in the villages that were invited to take part in the PES scheme, and by 9.1 percent in the business-as-usual group. Best of all, the team found no evidence that the villagers were gaming the system. “You might expect that the people signing up in droves are the ones who were planning to conserve trees anyway,” says Jayachandran. But, in fact, the enrollees’ past behavior suggested that they would actually have cut down more trees than the typical landowner.
Similarly, the satellite images showed that the villagers weren’t just cutting down trees in nea
y forests, or making deals with neighbors who hadn’t enrolled in the program. These “spillover effects” are often cited as possible inadvertent consequences of PES programs. But “we provide evidence that this worst-case thinking, which dampens investment in this approach, didn’t play out in this case,” says Jayachandran.  
Kelsey Jack, from Tufts University, cautions that “the results might change as the program matures and people become more familiar with it, and with any weaknesses in monitoring or enforcement.” In Jayachandran’s study, only a third of the landowners who were invited to take part in the PES program accepted. The results might have been different if a larger proportion had signed up—or if the scheme had been rolled out nationally. At that scale, PES could conceivably affect a country’s agricultural industry or its timber prices—both of which could change the incentives for cutting or preserving trees.  
Despite the low enrollment, the team calculated that they delayed the release of 183.5 metric tons of ca
on dioxide for each eligible landowner, and paid just 46 cents for each of those tons. The social cost of all that ca
on—that is, the cost of its negative influence on the environment—is around 2.4 times greater. Even if the landowners caught up on all their delayed deforestation once the payments ended, the program would still roughly
eak even. That makes a strong case for not only launching these schemes, but also keeping them going.
“It’s considerably cheaper than other ways of lowering ca
on emissions,” says Jayachandran. For example, the cost of subsidizing electric and hy
id cars in the U.S. is anywhere from four to 24 times greater than the social cost of the ca
on those vehicles avert. “Putting dollars and cents on the benefits should be helpful in nudging the policy world,” Jayachandran says.
China Wants Food. Brazil Pays the Price.
Published in the Atlantic, Fe
uary 15, 2020
The Amazon tends to evoke an Edenic vision—of a mysterious and impenetrable land, pregnant with beasts from jaguars to anacondas, rich with undiscovered flora. But parts of it are incongruous with this reputation, where big rig trucks rumble past dilapidated, grime-covered gas stations, and where land once thick with
ambly trees and the promise of jungle adventure has become cattle pasture or soy field.
We are traveling on a road unimaginatively named BR-163. Pull up Google Maps and zoom in to the state of Mato
Answered Same Day Jun 16, 2021

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Taruna answered on Jun 17 2021
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    ARTICLE ANALYSIS
The climate change is one of the most important issues of the modern times. There are several factors which are held responsible for the onset of distu
ance in the climate of the world like pollution, industrial growth and consumption of natural resources by human beings on rapid level. In fact, the climate changes are not subjected to be seen as environmental issues only; they have political influences as well especially in the regions where a large number of population depends greatly over the climate change happening. Their lives are changing due to the uneven distribution of the natural resources and some of them have even gone to the level of being extinct. In the selected article entitled The Amazon Cannot Be Recovered Once It’s Gone published in The Atlantic in 2019, it is showcased that the Amazon forests are getting reduced at a very fast degree and actions taken to control the situation are simply not enough.
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