Climate chaos hits Amazon river-dwellers
Pastor Dale Morgan
Climate chaos hits Amazon river-dwellers*
Alan Clendenning
June 8, 2009 - 2:29PM
Across the Amazon basin, river-dwellers are adding new floors to their
stilt houses, trying to stay above rising floodwaters that have killed
44 people and left 376,000 homeless.
Flooding is common in the world's largest remaining tropical wilderness
but this year the waters rose higher and stayed longer than they have in
decades, leaving fruit trees entirely submerged.
Only four years ago, the same communities suffered an unprecedented
drought that ruined crops and left mounds of river fish flapping and
rotting in the mud.
Experts suspect global warming may be driving wild climate swings that
appear to be punishing the Amazon with increasing frequency.
It's "the $1 million dollar question," says Carlos Nobre, a
climatologist with Brazil's National Institute for Space Research.
While a definitive answer will take years of careful study,
climatologists say the world should expect more extreme weather in the
years ahead.
Already, what happens in the Amazon could be affecting rainfall
elsewhere, from Brazil's agricultural heartland to the US grainbelt, as
rising ocean temperatures and rain forest destruction cause shifts in
global climate patterns.
"It's important to note that it's likely that these types of
record-breaking climate events will become more and more frequent in the
near future," Nobre said.
"So we all have to brace for more extreme climate in the near future.
"It's not for the next generation."
The immediate cause of the unusually heavy rains across northern Brazil
is an Atlantic Ocean weather system that usually moves on in March, but
stayed put until May this year.
Almost simultaneously, southern Brazilian states far from the Amazon
have suffered from an extended drought, caused by La Nina - a periodic
cooling of waters in the Pacific Ocean.
And La Nina alternates with El Nino, a heating up of Pacific waters that
is blamed for catastrophic forest fires plaguing the Amazon in recent years.
"Something is telling us to us to be more careful with the planet,"
Brazil's President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva said on his radio program.
"Changes are happening around the world, and we're seeing them as well
in Brazil."
Brazil's government approved $US440 million ($A550 million) in emergency
funding in response to the northern floods and southern drought.
The drought is pushing up international commodity prices for soy, used
worldwide as animal feed and as a key additive in cereal, pasta and
other processed foods.
And the floods forced the planet's largest iron ore producer to shut
down a key export railway for a week, slowing overseas shipments of the
raw ingredient for steel.
"I think we should be preparing for this to become more the norm, and
there's a need to look at what the future Amazon will look like," said
Daniel Nepstad, a tropical forest ecologist and chief program officer
for the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation's environmental conservation
program.
It is already grim for the poorest Amazon residents, the "ribeirinhos,"
(riverbank dwellers in Portuguese) many of whose families were drawn to
the spongy land by the world's 19th century rubber boom and have eked
out a living since then.
The ribeirinhos are used to the rivers' rise and fall, and time their
harvests to coincide with the end of the wet season but this year the
rains just didn't let up as they usually do in April.
Their bananas, beans, corn, manioc and watermelons lie ruined under the
muddy water.
"Most people lost their crops and their cows, and the only thing they
have left is their children and their homes," said Dorothea de Araujo,
the Amazon operations manager for the international aid group World
Vision, after touring an area where thousands were affected.
"They want to rebuild but they are scared of what will happen in the
future."
The government is giving lumber seized from illegal Amazon loggers to
the ribeirinhos so they can build their shacks higher.
The lumber is also going to slum dwellers whose stilt shanties litter
big jungle cities like Manaus - an industrial metropolis of 1.7 million
that's also a jumping off point for jungle tourism - so they can try to
stay dry as the mighty Rio Negro, an Amazon River tributary, approaches
a record high water mark set in 1953.
The floods are driving anacondas and scorpions to higher ground and
closer to humanity as they search for food.
While many of the animals in the Amazon thrive on the higher water,
experts warn that more droughts could sharply reduce the range of
species like pink Amazon River dolphins, already under pressure because
of deforestation and pollution.
"We could be looking at an Amazon that is much more populated by animals
that are generalists and can move through human landscapes, and some of
the more sensitive species will be caught in islands of habitats,"
Nepstad said.
In Trizidela do Vale, floodwaters reached the red tile rooftops of many
homes and left more than half of the town's 20,000 residents homeless.
Many sheltered in cow pens used for the town's annual cattle fair, until
officials closed them as unsanitary.
In Manaquiri, ribeirinhos whose crops were destroyed paddle into the
town of 19,000, seeking government handouts of food, medicine and clothing.
"We are used to floods and droughts and know how to co-exist with them,
but we are not used to them happening so swiftly and lasting so long and
causing so much damage," said schoolteacher Gleicimeire Freire, who
distributes aid with the Roman Catholic Church.
"This is what is scaring us."
In southern Rio Grande do Sul state, bordering Argentina and Uruguay,
many farmers say the driest weather in 80 years has withered their corn
and alfalfa.
Winter grass for cattle couldn't be planted, and milk production has
suffered, said Darcisio Perondo, a congressman who represents the state.
"In some villages there wasn't enough water for people to drink, and in
some towns they had to get water from the large rivers and tote it by
truck for the cattle," Perondo said.
Perondo called the situation a calamity but isn't sure if it global
warming is to blame.
"Anyone who reads the Bible knows that floods and droughts are
cyclical," he said.
"I just don't know if global warming is causing this."