This absurd increase shows the lack of policies to combat deforestation and environmental crimes in the Amazon, driven by the current administration. … The destruction just isn’t stopping.
Deforestation in the BrazilianAmazon reached a record high for the month of February, jumping by nearly two-thirds over last February’s level, according to official data released Friday.
Satellite images released by the Brazilian space agency INPE’s DETER monitoring program show 199 square kilometers (77 square miles) of the Amazon rainforest was lost to deforestation last month—the highest rate recorded in February since the agency began keeping records in 2015 and a 62% increase from last year during the same month.
Environmentalists find the data particularly alarming since February is considered the rainy season in the Amazon and generally sees the lowest rates of deforestation throughout the year.
As Indigenous communities and global environmentalists have been sounding the alarm on the imperiled rainforest, deforestation has skyrocketed under Brazil’s right-wing President Jair Bolsonaro. While the Amazon covers land in nine countries, approximately 60% of the forest lies in Brazil, which has reached its highest level of deforestation in more than a decade.
“This absurd increase shows the lack of policies to combat deforestation and environmental crimes in the Amazon, driven by the current administration. The destruction just isn’t stopping,” said Romulo Batista of Greenpeace Brazil in a statement.
Since Bolsonaro took office, deforestation in the Amazon has skyrocketed. A new set of bills proposed in the Brazilian Congress would enable further destruction that the forest cannot afford. We must fight for the Amazon, Indigenous Peoples rights, and for the climate. pic.twitter.com/IjuUg1VaHQ
— Greenpeace (@Greenpeace) March 11, 2022
Deforestation is predominantly caused by animal agriculture, soy production, logging, mining, and major construction, and has greatly impacted the nearly one million Indigenous people from over 300 tribes who live in the Brazilian Amazon.
“We are going to be eating the rainforest in our burgers,” Holly Gibbs, a land use scientist at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, told the Washington Post. “This is our moment as Americans to step forward and leverage some pressure to save the world, by helping to save the Amazon, which is critically important for the future of our planet.”
Research published this week in the journal Nature Climate Change found that the world’s largest rainforest was quickly reaching its “tipping point” and that the Amazon “has been losing resilience since the early 2000s, risking dieback with profound implications for biodiversity, carbon storage, and climate change at a global scale.”
Extinction Rebellion blockade of the Oberbaumbrücke. Credit: Leonhard Lenz, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons
World governments are spending $1.8 trillion annually to support fossil fuel emissions, deforestation, water pollution, and other harms to biodiversity and the planet.
By Julia Conley, Common Dreams (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0)
Releasing a new study showing that world governments spend at least $1.8 trillion annually to subsidize activities which worsen the climate crisis, global subsidies experts on Thursday said leaders must eliminate or redirect the financial supports as part of an ambitious Global Biodiversity Framework at an upcoming summit in China.
“Reforming the $1.8 trillion a year of subsidies that are harming the environment could make an important contribution towards unlocking the over $700 billion a year needed to reverse nature loss by 2030.
The B Team and Business for Nature, two organizations that push businesses around the globe to adopt sustainable practices, supported the study, titled Financing Our Survival: Building a Nature-Positive Economy Through Subsidy Reform.
According to the authors—Doug Koplow of subsidy research firm Earth Track and Ronald Steenblik of the International Institute for Sustainable Development—a lack of transparency regarding the use of subsidies means that the amount of government money being spent on the destruction of nature could be much higher than the research shows.
Photo by Evan Nitschke from Pexels
“Nature is declining at an alarming rate, and we have never lived on a planet with so little biodiversity,” said Christiana Figueres, former executive secretary of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) and a member of The B Team. “At least $1.8 trillion is funding the destruction of nature and changing our climate, while creating huge risks for the very businesses who are receiving the subsidies… Harmful subsidies must be redirected towards protecting the climate and nature, rather than financing our own extinction.”
The report identifies at least $640 billion in annual fossil fuel subsidies, $520 billion used by the agricultural sector, $350 billion in water management and wastewater infrastructure, and $155 billion subsidizing logging and unsustainable forest management, all of which account for the majority of annual subsidies.
🚨 The world is spending at least $1.8 trillion each year — equivalent to 2% of global GDP — on subsidies that drive the destruction of nature, according to new research.@bfncoalition, @thebteamhq and @RonSteenblik call for #SubsidyReform at #COP15.
— UN Biodiversity (@UNBiodiversity) February 17, 2022
The equivalent of at least 2% of the global GDP is being spent by governments to finance water pollution and air pollution, soil erosion, deforestation, biodiversity loss, planet-heating fossil fuel emissions, risks to ecosystems in oceans and waterways across the globe, and other harms to nature and humanity, the authors said.
To help finance climate crisis mitigation measures in the Global South—as wealthy nations pledged they would in 2009, promising $100 billion annually—and redirect government funds toward a transition to renewable energy and a reversal of nature loss, hundreds of billions of dollars in subsidies must be eliminated or repurposed, according to the report.
A draft of the Global Biodiversity Framework calls for $500 billion per year in reformed subsidies—a target that “needs to be strengthened” in April at the U.N. Biodiversity Conference (COP 15) in Kunming, China.
“The case is clear: reforming the $1.8 trillion a year of subsidies that are harming the environment could make an important contribution towards unlocking the over $700 billion a year needed to reverse nature loss by 2030 as well as the cost of reaching net zero carbon emissions by 2050,” wrote the authors. “This needs to happen alongside aligning all private financial flows to nature-positive and increasing public and private finance to deliver innovative financial solutions that help protect, restore, and conserve nature.”
“With political determination and radical public-private sector collaboration,” they added, “we can reform these harmful subsidies and create opportunities for an equitable, nature-positive and net-zero economy. To do so, we must bring awareness, transparency, and disclosure on subsidies from both governments and business.”
Ahead of the biodiversity conference in April, said Business for Nature, negotiators must strengthen the Global Biodiversity Framework draft by including a commitment to reform “ALL harmful subsidies, including indirect and direct incentives.”
“Climate action is at a crossroads, in part because of the large scale of public money flowing to harmful industries and practices,” said Mary Robinson, former president of Ireland and member of The B Team. “We need to see thorough subsidy reform from governments and businesses, with social and environmental considerations at the heart, to ensure a just and equitable transition for all.”
Fracking Site in Warren Center, PA, August 23, 2013, Source: Fracking Lawyer, Ostroff Law, (CC BY 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons).
Harvard researchers provide further evidence that, as one environmental advocate has said, “fracking is inherently hazardous to the health and safety of people and communities in proximity to it.”
Elderly individuals who live near or downwind of fracking and other “unconventional” drilling operations are at higher risk of early death compared with seniors who don’t live in close proximity to such sites, according to a new study out Thursday from the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.
Airborne contaminants from more than 2.5 million oil and gas wells across the U.S., researchers wrote in a paper published in the peer-reviewed journal Nature Energy, are contributing to increased mortality among people 65 and older residing in neighborhoods close to or downwind from what is called unconventional oil and gas development (UOGD)—extraction methods that include directional (non-vertical) drilling and hydraulic fracturing.
“Although UOGD is a major industrial activity in the U.S., very little is known about its public health impacts,” Petros Koutrakis, professor of environmental sciences and one of the paper’s co-authors, said in a statement. “Our study is the first to link mortality to UOGD-related air pollutant exposures.”
Co-author Francesca Dominici, professor of biostatistics, population, and data science, added that “there is an urgent need to understand the causal link between living near or downwind of UOGD and adverse health effects.”
Earlier research, the Harvard Chan School acknowledged in its press release, has “found connections between UOGD activities and increased human exposure to harmful substances in both air and water, as well as connections between UOGD exposure and adverse prenatal, respiratory, cardiovascular, and carcinogenic health outcomes. But little was known about whether exposure to UOGD was associated with mortality risk in the elderly, or about exactly how exposure to UOGD-related activities may be contributing to such risk.”
To find out more, a team of 10 scholars analyzed a cohort of nearly 15.2 million Medicare beneficiaries living in all of the nation’s major UOGD exploration regions from 2001 to 2015. They also examined data collected from more than 2.5 million oil and gas wells.
For each Medicare recipient’s ZIP code and year in the cohort, researchers calculated what pollutant exposures would be if one lived close to UOGD operations, downwind of them, or both, while adjusting for socioeconomic, environmental, and demographic factors.
The closer people lived to fracked gas and other unconventional wells, the greater their risk of premature mortality, researchers found.
According to the Harvard Chan School’s summary of the study:
Those who lived closest to wells had a statistically significant elevated mortality risk (2.5% higher) compared with those who didn’t live close to wells. The study also found that people who lived near UOGD wells as well as downwind of them were at higher risk of premature death than those living upwind, when both groups were compared with people who were unexposed.
“Our findings suggest the importance of considering the potential health dangers of situating UOGD near or upwind of people’s homes,” said Longxiang Li, a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Environmental Health and lead author of the study.
The new study adds to a growing body of literature linking fossil fuels to negative health outcomes. In a recent report, the World Health Organization warned that burning coal, oil, and gas is “causing millions of premature deaths every year through air pollutants, costing the global economy billions of dollars annually, and fueling the climate crisis.”
Another recent study estimated that eliminating greenhouse gas emissions by 2050 would save 74 million lives this century. Despite mounting evidence of the deadly toll of fossil fuels, President Joe Biden has yet to use his executive authority to cancel nearly two dozen fracked gas export projects that are set to unleash pollution equivalent to roughly 400 new coal-fired power plants.
So-called unconventional drilling practices have grown rapidly over the past decade, becoming the most common form of extraction in the U.S. As of 2015, the Harvard Chan School pointed out, “more than 100,000 UOGD land-based wells were drilled using directional drilling combined with fracking,” and “roughly 17.6 million U.S. residents currently live within one kilometer of at least one active well.”
Fracking threatens every person on the planet, directly or indirectly. It should be banned entirely.
—Wenonah Hauter, executive director of Food & Water Watch
Oil rig, ~12219-12999 Macon Road, Saline Township, Michigan, June 22, 2012. Source: Dwight Burdette, (CC BY 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons).
In contrast to conventional oil and gas drilling, methods such as fracking require “larger volumes of water, proppants (sand or other materials used to keep hydraulic fractures open), and chemicals,” the Harvard Chan School noted.
Last summer, Physicians for Social Responsibility (PSR) uncovered internal records revealing that since 2012, fossil fuel corporations have injected potentially carcinogenic per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS), or chemicals that can degrade into PFAS, into the ground while fracking for oil and gas—after former President Barack Obama’s Environmental Protection Agency approved their use despite agency scientists’ concerns about toxicity.
At the time, Wenonah Hauter, executive director of Food & Water Watch, called the PSR report “alarming,” and said it “confirms what hundreds of scientific studies and thousands of pages of data have already shown over the last decade: fracking is inherently hazardous to the health and safety of people and communities in proximity to it.”
“This says nothing of the dreadful impact fossil fuel extraction and burning is having on our runaway climate crisis. Fracking threatens every person on the planet, directly or indirectly,” said Hauter. “It should be banned entirely.”
