ENVIRONMENT: El Nino Strikes Deep Into Amazonia

By Mario Osava Reprint | | Print |

Mario Osava

RIO DE JANEIRO, Nov 21 1997 (IPS) - Freakish weather attributed to the phenomenon known as El Nino – a warm Pacific current – is causing one of the most prolonged and intense droughts in the history of the Amazonian region. This, on top of the usual environmental hazards such as fires and deforestation has made 1997 a year of horror for Brazil.

The scarcity of rain has caused a drop in water levels right along ther Amazon River, dried up areas that are usually flooded, and altered ecological conditions so as to increase the likelihood of fires, which already have destroyed millions of hectares of forest.

For the first time, Manaos – capital of the state of Amazonia, and a center which has suffered relatively little deforestation – was immersed in smoke and was forced to shut down its airport for several days. A similar scenario is affecting the southern and eastern parts of the country, where agriculture has been expanding by burning down sections of forests.

The current drought is due to a combination of two factors – a prolonged dry season caused by El Nino, and the paving of the highway that connects Manaos with the Venezuelan border, said Carlos Nobre, an expert in meteorology at the National Institute of Space Research (INPE).

In the decade of the 1970s and the beginning of the 80s, the government used tax incentives to foment livestock-raising in the area north of Manaos, which was later abandoned when it became deforested.

The vegetation was beginning to regenerate, just when “the asphalt came” last year, allowing better access to the region and stimulating economic recovery, Nobre said

Other factors contributed to this process of deforestation, considered the worst of the Amazonian forest, said Alberto Setzer, also a researcher at the INPE which monitors forest fires through a system of satellite images.

New legislation which raised the mandatory percentage of preserved area in each Amazonian property from 50 to 80 percent, had the opposite effect in the short term. It urged landowners to deforest their land, in order to register it as cultivated land, Setzer explained.

Brazil’s economic growth since the stabilization of the currency in 1994 also stimulated greater land use and the execution of new projects.

“El Nino was only one of the factors,” although an important one, Setzer said. The drought led to “many forest fires that could not be controlled” by those who provoke them, surpassing the borders of their respective properties and even reaching neighboring original forests, he added.

Another problem is that the scarcity of rainfall has affected the heart of the Amazonian region and its most vital element: water. The water level has rarely been so low, while lagoons and related ecosystems have become isolated. The full gravity of the situation will only be known in the medium term.

For the past several weeks Manaos has been without electricity for about six hours a day, because the water shortage diminishes the capacity of the hydro-electric dams.

Some cities have been deprived of their only means of transportation – rivers – because they are not deep enough for larger boats.

Many recently hatched turtles are dying of dehydration, because their nests are now far from the rivers or lagoons – due to irregular ebbs and flows – explained biologist Juarez Brito Pezzuti, who wrote his Master’s thesis on the behavior of Amazonian tortoises.

In his fieldwork, conducted in 1996, Pezzuti found that the birth rates of tortoises is declining rapidly, mainly due to human consumption of their eggs, but also because their nests are flooded regularly.

Now, with the drought, there is no water to drown the eggs, and an increase in animal mortality due to thirst and greater exposure to their natural predators, which are ” much more concentrated in much smaller volumes of water,” he said.

“We are sure, although not absolutely sure, that the level of rainfall – far below the average – is due to El Nino.” This occurred once in 1983, when the waters of the Pacific reached unusually high temperatures, said Carlos Nobre.

The lack of rainfall has affected especially the center-north and northeast of the Amazonian region, extending from northern Brazil up to Venezuela, Suriname and Guyana, he said.

But there is no telling what will happen in the coming months. “The effects of El Nino are different every time,” said the researcher.

In any case, even if the rain does return soon, it will be several months before river levels return to normal, especially in the northern tributaries of the Amazon, concluded Nobre.