The Amazon basin accounts for a fifth of the freshwater flowing into the world’s oceans, but many of the region’s key rivers have been severely depleted by the dry spell – the fourth severe drought to hit the Amazon in less than 20 years.

The drier conditions have raised fears among scientists that climate change, deforestation, fires and other human impacts are pushing the Amazon to a “tipping point” that threatens to alter the forest irreparably and turn it into a drier environment resembling a savannah.

“There is something impacting (the forest’s) climate which did not impact it before the 1960s,” said Brazilian climate scientist Paulo Artaxo, a member of the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

What is meant by the Amazon’s tipping point?

Writing in the Science Advances journal in 2018, climatologists Carlos Nobre and Thomas Lovejoy used the phrase “tipping point” to refer to the possible impact of environmental destruction in the Amazon, especially deforestation, climate change and fires.

Their influential article estimated that between 20% and 25% of the Amazon forest must be kept intact to prevent portions of it from turning into a drier ecosystem akin to a savannah.

The researchers argued that much of the Amazon’s moisture comes from air blown in from the Atlantic Ocean, which is then repeatedly absorbed and released by plants, trees and water masses in the forest.

Without tree coverage, however, more than half of the Amazon’s rainwater runs off, taking it out of that cycle.

In addition to deforestation, global warming has also been found in climate models to be driving droughts in the Amazon.

A 2022 paper published in the journal Science estimated that if warming exceeds 3.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial times, the Amazon could reach a tipping point and die out, independent of how much tree cover is lost.

How much of the Amazon has been destroyed?

When European colonizers first arrived in the Amazon rainforest, it covered 647 million hectares – but 13% of that has since been lost, according to a 2022 estimate from the Monitoring of the Andean Amazon Project (MAAP).

According to Matt Finer, senior researcher and director at MAAP, the eastern part of the Amazon has lost 31% of its forest cover – especially worrying as it is more likely to disrupt the Atlantic moisture flow, which enters the forest there.

On top of that, 38% of the Amazon has been degraded, found research published this year by Science.

There are various signs that the forest is becoming less resilient, especially in the “arc of deforestation” that spans the ecosystem’s southern and eastern fringes in Brazil.

A 2021 paper in the Nature journal shows that the Brazilian Amazon’s southeastern region is now emitting more planet-heating carbon than it absorbs, even in rainy years, when vegetation usually thrives – hence absorbing more CO2.

How bad is the Amazon’s current drought?

There are indications that the drought may be even worse than the one that hit the Amazon in 2005, and that the region is steadily becoming drier.

As of Nov. 1, six out of 22 river monitoring stations had registered their lowest level on record, and only five were at normal levels.

In the city of Manaus, which has been choked with smoke from the wildfires, the Rio Negro has fallen to its lowest level in 121 years.

Research shows that since the 1970s, when deforestation in Brazil’s Amazon gained pace, the dry season has increased by up to a month in the ecosystem’s southern areas.

Research released in 2022 by MapBiomas, a collaboration between universities, nonprofit groups and technology companies, found Brazil’s Amazon lost 14.5% of its surface water between 1985 and 2021.

“Marshland has been drying up year by year,” said Carlos Souza, coordinator at MapBiomas.

What does the drought mean for climate change?

The Amazon is currently a carbon sink, meaning it absorbs planet-heating carbon. But if too many trees die and rot, it would become a net carbon emitter – accelerating climate change.

In 2005, when the last severe drought hit the Amazon, so many trees died that the forest emitted more greenhouse gases than Europe and Japan’s annual emissions, according to a 2009 study published in Science.

Can an Amazon tipping point be averted?

Some researchers say that for parts of the Amazon it is too late to avoid a tipping point.

“The tipping point is not a future scenario (…) rather a stage already present in some areas,” said a 2022 report by the Amazonian Network of Georeferenced Socio Environmental Information (RAISG).

RAISG recommends designating unprotected public land as environmental reserves or recognizing them as Indigenous territories, which research shows are particularly well-protected from deforestation.

Another 6% of the forest’s original area should be restored, the group says.

Deforestation in Brazil’s Amazon dropped by 22.3% in the 12 months through July, government data showed.

Late last year, Brazil’s incoming President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva renewed his country’s pledge – first made under the 2015 Paris Agreement – to reforest by 2030 12 million hectares of forest land, an area roughly the size of England.

The most recent data shows that forest restoration projects covered 74,000 hectares in 2021, mostly outside of the Amazon.

An August 2023 study from Brazilian think-tank Instituto Escolhas estimated that investments of 228 billion reais ($46.85 billion) are needed to make good on Brazil’s reforestation pledge by 2030.

($1 = 4.8670 reais)

Andre Cabette Fabio is Climate and Nature Correspondent for the Thomson Reuters Foundation based in Rio de Janeiro.

This article was produced by the Thomson Reuters Foundation. Visit them at https://www.context.news/

It is here that Daniela Silva cries out, “Belo Monte is dead!”, as she lays down a poster handwritten with the same message.

Daniela’s family is among the more than 14,000 people displaced by the construction of the hydropower plant, which has violently disrupted the local ecosystem.

They were resettled in small, newly built houses known as ‘ruquis’ (a colloquial term for ‘collective urban resettlements’) far from the river they had lived alongside and no longer within walking distance of Altamira city center.

“Before, there was a really strong sense of community,” says Dani, as she is known locally. “When we were little girls, we played together in the streets, and the community took care of us while our parents went out to work or fish in the river.

“We belonged to the river, to the forest. We were happy. We were rich.”

The Belo Monte dam represents the extractivism that has dominated Brazilian politics, on the Left and the Right, for decades. Altamira and its community were forever changed between 2011 and 2013, when 45,000 workers came to construct it.

The families lost their jobs. The canoes were left without water. The communities could no longer fish. The islands flooded, and trees drowned and died, leaving a desolate landscape.

“Before I had a live river. Now I have a dead lake,” said Raimundo Berro Grosso, another member of the community, in a quote included in journalist Eliane Brum’s recent book about the Amazon, ’Banzeiro òkòtó’.

‘Pushed into misery’

We contacted Norte Energia, the company that operates the Belo Monte dam, to ask it to comment on an earlier version of this article, but it did not respond.

The construction of the ‘Belo Monster’, as it is known locally, unleashed a socio-environmental catastrophe whose consequences are still difficult to comprehend. It destroyed the habitat of a vast area known as Volta Grande do Xingu, and the lives and futures of the communities on its banks.

Dani’s father lost his job as a brickmaker. One of her brothers was shot in the back and killed when the police stormed the house of his friend, who was accused of dealing drugs, and another brother became depressed and died by suicide.

“Now we are poor. To be poor is to not be able to choose. To be poor is to beg for gasoline to go to the city center. It is to need money to buy a mango in the supermarket,” she continues.

Standing in front of the abandoned lot where her home once stood, Dani is overcome by tears.

“Belo Monte pushed the people into misery. It ripped us out of our homes, and it didn’t give us any tools to rebuild our lives,” she says. “That can never be replaced. Being poor, being miserable, is to not remember where we came from.”

Hundreds of families like Dani’s were torn apart by Belo Monte, which was conceived during the country’s military dictatorship from 1965 to 1985. It was designed as part of a project that initially involved a system of up to eight dams throughout the rivers of the lower Brazilian Amazon.

The same period also led to the overexploitation of the jungle and the construction of the Trans-Amazonian highway, which became the needle in an enormous syringe used for massive, systemic extraction of the resources of the tropical forest, which today is in ruins.

But in the 1980s, Belo Monte generated great opposition among Indigenous and riverside communities, and its funding was withdrawn by the World Bank as a result. The project was revived 20 years later with funding from Brazil’s public national development bank, and although it was still opposed by many, this time construction progressed, promoted by successive governments of the then-ruling Brazilian Workers’ Party.

The hydroelectric power plant was inaugurated twice: once by President Dilma Rousseff in May 2016, when the first turbine began operating, and again by President Jair Bolsonaro in November 2019, when the last turbine began and the plant became fully operational.

During the low rainfall season, only one of the 18 turbines is functioning – due to changes in the design of the dam which now operates following the seasonal variation of river flow – demonstrating the hubris of a project that is failing to produce the 11,000 megawatts of “clean sustainable energy” still advertised on signs around Altamira.

A feminist fight

Since the project was first announced in the 1980s, a series of female activists in Altamira – including Mónica Brito, Antonia Melo, Francineide Ferreira and Raimunda Gomes – have led the charge against it. These women inspired Dani, who, in the words of Eliane Brum, “invents herself as a warrior”.

The jungle is often compared to a violated woman’s body. It corresponds to the predatory conceptions of the Amazon shared by many Brazilians, particularly Bolsonaro and his followers.

Brum affirms this idea: “Being a woman is being a Xingu violated by Belo Monte. It is being a burned tree when the smoke covers the Amazonian sun to hide the horror of the crime.”

Dani’s fight fits squarely into this powerful image of the disaster in the Amazon basin. We are rapidly approaching a point of no return: some scientists predict that when the Amazon’s deforestation reaches 20-25%, much of the tropical forest will be turned into an immense savannah.

Against this dire threat, Dani is putting her body on the line. She participates in several anti-deforestation initiatives and works to strengthen civil society to confront the landowners who drive their trucks through Altamira, which the Belo Monte devastated and turned into the most violent city in all of Brazil.

Dani is aware that her fight for Altamira is also a fight for the Amazon, and for the entire planet, whose future is being destroyed on a daily basis.

“Fighting for the Amazon today is not an isolated fight. Defending the Amazon, the jungle, is defending life,” she says. “We are not here preventing the development that they talk about.

“When they build a hydropower plant in a sacred river like the Xingu, it is not only the Xingu that dies, along with the people, but it has a domino effect. It falls, it falls, it falls […] and poof.”

Pablo Albarenga is an Uruguayan journalist who works with indigenous peoples of the Amazon.

Francesc Badia i Dalmases is a Mexican journalist, a film producer, and the founder and director of democraciaAbierta, the Latin American associate section of openDemocracy.net, London. A political analyst, an author, and a publisher, Francesc specializes in geopolitics and international affairs. Francesc is a regular contributor to international newspapers like El País or The Guardian, a Pulitzer Center grantee, and was awarded the Gabo Prize in 2021 for his work in the Amazon. Follow him on Twitter: @fbadiad Instagram: francescbadiaidalmases3

This article appeared originally in Open Democracy – https://www.opendemocracy.net/

The increasing cost of production originally brought about the postponement, with potential investors such as GDF Suez (among others) threatening to back out of the auction as the new estimated price nears 20 billion Brazilian reais (US$ 11.2 billion).

Earlier this year, the Brazilian government authorized the initial process of the construction of the Belo Monte Dam on the Xingu River to begin even though it has drawn heated opposition from local communities, environmentalists and indigenous rights activists.

These groups have defended Amazon rights for many years; however, as environmental topics become more pressing in today’s world, the proponents of renewable energy sources, such as hydroelectric dams, have taken strong positions worldwide as the Kyoto Protocol ends in 2012.

Even though Brazil is currently becoming an economic powerhouse, it maintains low emission levels, with only 1.86 metric tons of CO2 emissions per capita (i.e. ten times less than the United States).

Moreover, Brasília has worked toward becoming environmentally responsible, as it voluntarily committed to cut its emissions by approximately 40% from projected 2020 levels. Thus, the development of a hydroelectric plant satisfies the call for clean, new energy resources while simultaneously fulfilling the growing need for energy.

However, while the advantages behind clean, renewable energy will be made available by the Belo Monte Dam, the dam itself could contribute to severe flooding and wreak harm on the ecosystems in the flood plain of the Xingu River, as well as give off damaging amounts of methane. The flooding and the environmental ramifications, consequently, could profoundly affect the lives and welfare of the local population.

Indigenous Biosphere

Due to the call for renewable energy, the Brazilian government accelerated the development of the Belo Monte Dam. On February 1st, the Brazilian Environmental Agency (IBAMA) issued the first license needed for construction of a hydroelectric plant. IBAMA has worked on this matter for years and recently issued the license after numerous discussions and compromises.

In the months prior to February, the process had been stalled in order to ventilate some of the issues surrounding the long lasting effects that the dam would have on indigenous communities. It was soon being whispered that senior IBAMA officials had prepared their resignation papers due to the politics and pressures of the licensing process.

This arose from the conflicting arguments that inevitably accompany the controversial approval process to bring the hydroelectric dam into existence. In order for the project to effectively commence, there are still two other environmental licenses that must be obtained, as well as some 40 conditions that the contractors must satisfy.

The government has already been accused by the Catholic Bishop of the Xingu Prelacy for permitting the project to move into the production stage while overlooking the adverse effects that could jeopardize the environment and bedevil the indigenous inhabitants who would be forced out of their homes.

The Brazilian Ministry of Mines and Energy stated that the dam is expected to commence production in 2015, and it will cost around 20 billion reais (US$ 11.2 billion at the current rates), though both are still being disputed and subject to change.

According to Guardian News, Brazil’s Minister of Environment Carlos Minc declared that the company that wins the contract will have to spend around US$ 800 million to counter the environmental damage anticipated by the project. Yet, Minc was also quoted as saying that no indigenous person will be displaced and that they will only be affected indirectly by the project.

However, other sources such as the Berkeley, California-based NGO International Rivers have concluded that the devastation of these tribes will be inconceivable and vast. The natives in the Volta Grande region alongside the Xingu River will have no water, fish or means of transport through this region after the dam diverts the river.

The lack of accessible water will also prove extremely detrimental to the farmers, the lack of fish will take away a source of food, and the lack of transport will further alienate the tribes from the outside world.

A letter, written to President Luiz Inácio Lula de Silva from 140 groups and organizations against the construction of the dam, mentioned that, “the formation of small, stagnant pools of water among the rocks of the Volta Grande will be a prime environment for the proliferation of malaria and other water-borne diseases.”

Deceitfulness

BBC News states that the Belo Monte Dam will provide 11,000 KW of electricity – enough energy for 23 million homes. The dam will be the third largest in the world after the Three Gorges in China and Itaipu in Southern Brazil. However, while the facility will provide enough energy for 23 million homes, the dam is not as efficient as its advocates have claimed.

It will generate less than 10% of its capacity during the three to four months of the low-water season, and thus will not have the ability to sustain the same amount of power generation year-round. Due to this utterly predictable cycle, other dams will need to be built upstream in order to maintain a constant yearly flow at the power source.

According to Amazon Watch, an NGO fighting to protect the rainforest and indigenous peoples living in the region, the Brazilian government has plans to construct additional hydroelectric facilities at Altamira (6,588 MW), Ipixuna (1900 MW), Kakraimoro (1490 mil MW) and Jarina (620 MW).

These supplementary structures will flood various Kayapo reserves and the land of the Araweté, Assurini and Arara native peoples. According to The Rio Times, the dam would flood 500 square kilometers of land, which is home to 24 different indigenous tribes, and would directly impact the Paquiçamba reserve of the Juruna indigenous people – thus forcing 12,000 people to relocate.

Projections say that more than 6,000 km² of forests in Altamira would be damaged, and one third of the population would be relocated with a possibility that up to 40,000 people could be displaced or greatly affected by the inauguration of the dam. Francisco Hernandez, an electrical engineer who analyzed the project observed:

    “Belo Monte is a project of doubtful engineering viability, an extremely complex project which would depend on the construction not only of one dam, but rather a series of large dams and dykes that would interrupt the flow of water courses over an enormous area, requiring excavation of earth and rocks on the scale of that carried out for digging the Panama Canal.”

Furthermore, there are at least 70 additional dams planned for the Amazon regions of Brazil according to BBC News. Thus, it can be concluded that the installation of the primary Belo Monte Dam on the Xingu River is only the first step in a series of construction projects that will occur all along the rivers in the Amazon and will adversely affect the people while simultaneously creating dangerous assaults on the ecosystems of the Amazon rainforest itself.

Environmental Devastation

It is evident, that the Brazilian government has chosen to ignore the negative impacts of the Belo Monte Dam on both the indigenous population and the environment. The fact that the dam is likely to have a dramatically negative effect on the environment is a paradox in itself because it has been promoted to its own population, as well as the international communities, as a means to fight Brazil’s energy crisis through clean energy production.

For instance, according to the environmental source International Rivers, Belo Monte’s energy production process will result in the release of large quantities of methane, a greenhouse gas that contributes to global warming 21 times more than CO2. The methane emissions will result from the flooding of the dam.

Predictably, after the water inundates the region, the trees and plants rot and then, as they decay, the resulting carbon settles on the bottom of the reservoir where it further decomposes without the benefit of a source for oxygen. This would prevent a build-up of dissolved methane. As the water passes through the dam’s turbines, the previously built up methane is released into the atmosphere as a greenhouse gas.

International Rivers, cites studies which show that through investments in energy efficiency, “Brazil could cut demand for electricity by 40% by 2020 and save US$ 19 billion in the process. The amount of energy saved would be equivalent to 14 Belo Monte dams.”

These studies raise significant questions about whether or not the Amazon rainforest and its natives should bear the burden of the dam’s negative effects for the renewable energy source that otherwise would come from the Belo Monte Dam, rather than artful conservation practices.

However, since Brazil and the world have energy depletion concerns as well as fears concerning climate change, in their minds, a controversial power source like a hydroelectric dam would seem to be a clean, effective alternative at the right price.

A perfect example of a failed hydroelectric facility is the condemned Uribante reservoir-fed dam in Venezuela. Due to climate change and lack of rainfall it has failed to supply water to two thirds of the population that depends on it. Today, Hugo Chávez has declared Venezuela to be in a state of emergency because of the severe drought and is looking into wind and nuclear power to fill the new void.

Pressing issues concerning the welfare of the indigenous population and environmental protection have been prevalent for years in regards to the planning of the Belo Monte Dam that is finally on the verge of being launched. The Belo Monte project has been on the drawing board for decades, but it has not been approved due to the rejections by the environmental communities and other agencies and organizations that have protested its designed construction.

The first license was not granted until February 1st of this year due to the long process of drafting agreements and obtaining signatures while creating plans that would appropriately protect and limit the stress affecting the native people and the environment of the affected region.

Furthermore, as Brazil continues to grow economically and as it seeks international acknowledgement, a project as extensive as Belo Monte will attract immense media coverage, especially as negotiations continue.

IBAMA’s agreement to pursue the construction of the Belo Monte Dam has allowed the process to continue to the next steps; it now seems as though the dam is well on its way to construction.

However, even though the dam has made progress, it does not appear that the debates and opposition arguments have entirely disappeared, as seen with the recent delay. Issues faced by indigenous peoples, as well as the ever-increasing evidence of environmental problems that faces the world today, ensures that a fight for the protection of those likely to be adversely affected by its completion will continue.

Nevertheless, at this point, marginalized groups seem destined to have to face the eventual triumph of the project despite however many rational arguments against the resolution of Belo Monte’s realization exist. Thus, the inevitable dismantlement subsists at the cost of massive construction on the Xingu River for a supposed source of clean energy.

Leland Garivaltis is a research associate at the Council on Hemispheric Affairs (COHA) – www.coha.org. The organization is a think tank established in 1975 to discuss and promote inter-American relationship. Email: coha@coha.org.