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Thirst in the World's Freshwater Paradise |
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By Mario Osava *
The worst drought in the Amazon in 50 years has isolated entire villages, killed tons of fish and fuelled uncontrollable forest fires. The tragedy will be irreversible if deforestation continues, warn experts.
RIO DE JANEIRO - A shortage of water in the heart of the Brazilian Amazon, one of the world's largest sources of freshwater, might seem unconceivable, but it is real and should serve as a red alert to the irreversible tragedy that will unfold if deforestation is not curbed, warn experts consulted by Tierramérica.
Rivers and lakes nearly dry, hundreds of tons of dead fish, isolated villages supplied with food by helicopters, boats beached in the mud and people forced to walk kilometers to look for water are becoming a common sight in many parts of the southwest Brazilian Amazon.
Considered the worst in 50 years, the current drought has taken an especially heavy toll on the states of Acre and Amazonas. Local residents are still waiting for the emergency aid promised by the government, which has earmarked 14 million dollars for this purpose.
In Acre, the four-month dry spell has left riverbeds without water, while fires are spreading uncontrollably through the forests because of the lack of moisture, environmental specialist Paulo Moutinho told Tierramérica shortly after returning from the area.
Smoke from the forest fires has reduced visibility and forced people to wear protective masks on the streets, added Moutinho, coordinator of the non-governmental Amazon Environmental Research Institute.
The effects of the drought will be long-lasting. The recovery of the area's fish stocks will take years, and fish is a main food source for the people living in the villages along the riverbanks. The local population will need assistance for a considerable time, because life will not simply return to normal when the rains come back, he said.
Far from Acre, in the municipality of Caapiranga, some 200 km from Manaus, capital of the state of Amazonas, the Great Lake of Manacapurú, fed by the river of the same name, has dried up.
As a result, a dozen villages have been left completely isolated, because waterways serve as "roads" in the Amazon, and boats are the primary means of transportation.
In Caapiranga, which had a population of 9,736 inhabitants in 2004, two thirds of them rural dwellers, municipal official Raimundo da Silva is tending to a well that provides water for 17 families. "Three wells in town have already dried up, and mine is running low, but it still has enough water," he said.
Everything the town needs must be brought in along the Manacapurú River, where only two small boats can currently travel, and the supplies are then transported in land vehicles across the 32.5 km of the dried-out lake bed.
"There are at least 10 larger boats that are beached," Da Silva told Tierramérica in a telephone interview. In all his 29 years, he said, he never even dreamed that something like this could happen.
"The government assistance is starting to arrive," he reported, referring to the hampers of food and medicine being distributed since last week by the Amazonas state government, with the help of the armed forces. At least 32,000 families in the state will be beneficiaries of the emergency aid program.
A state of emergency has been declared in the 62 municipalities in Amazonas, primarily because of the critical shortage of transportation and drinking water. The authorities estimate that some 197,000 people in 914 communities have been affected by the drought, and they are now studying evacuation plans.
Some researchers attribute the drought to the fact that the intertropical convergence zone (ICTZ), where the warm moist air currents from the north and south come together and normally bring heavy rains, has moved further north, as a result of the significant rise in sea surface temperatures in the northern Atlantic.
This same phenomenon has been deemed responsible for the record-breaking intensity of storms like Hurricane Katrina, which battered the southeastern coast of the United States in September, and Hurricane Wilma, which thrashed Mexico's Yucatan Peninsula last weekend.
The unusually low water levels in the rivers of the Amazon region should serve as a lesson on the vulnerability of this ecosystem to phenomena that reduce rainfall and are likely to become ever more frequent and intense, Moutinho said.
U.S. scientist Thomas Lovejoy, who has been studying the Amazon for four decades, fears deforestation could reach the point where it breaks the balance needed to ensure the very survival of the forests, unleashing a "vicious cycle" of irreversible destruction.
Moisture and rainfall levels are usually high in the region because there is abundant forest cover, and vice versa. When a certain amount of forest cover is lost, precipitation is reduced, leading in turn to more loss of forest cover, and so on, he explained.
"Many of us believe that this could happen if deforestation surpasses 30 percent," Lovejoy told Tierramérica.
Maintaining the current rate of deforestation in the Amazon is "a very dangerous game," because of the high risk of "negative synergies" with other factors, like El Niño (a climate phenomenon that causes droughts in the Amazon), forest fires and climate change, warns Lovejoy, president of the Washington-based Heinz Center for Science, Economics and the Environment.
It would be better to stop the deforestation process long before it reaches the breaking point, such as at 20 percent, which would also prevent a further loss of biodiversity, he added.
The Amazon has already lost 17 percent of its forests, but what is considered "disturbed area," including small logging operations not captured by satellite monitoring, is actually much larger, said Eneas Salati, former director of the state-run National Institute for Amazon Research.
Due to climate change, air masses rise up over the Amazon region, lose moisture and come back down hot and dry, a phenomenon that creates deserts when it is ongoing, Salati told Tierramérica.
"This has never happened before in the 40 years that I've been studying the region," he said, adding that there is no record of it taking place before.
What cannot be stated for certain is whether the sea surface temperatures in the Atlantic have risen "naturally or as the result of climate changes induced by human activity," he commented.
There are three forces contributing to changes in the Amazon region's climate, said Salati, who is now the director of the state-run Brazilian Foundation for Sustainable Development. Two of these are the result of human activity: deforestation and global climate change. The third is a natural phenomenon, the cyclical variations in the Earth's rotational axis and accompanying sunspot cycles.
This combination of factors all lead in the same direction, and the global warming process could make natural cyclical phenomena like El Niño even more frequent.
El Niño, which results from increased water temperatures flowing across the Pacific Ocean, led to a drought in the northern Brazilian Amazon region in 1998. The resulting forest fires destroyed 1.3 million hectares of forest cover in Roraima state, which borders Venezuela and Guyana.
* Mario Osava is an IPS correspondent.
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