Manoel Cardoso

Hydro-climatic and ecological behaviour of the drought of Amazonia in 2005

In 2005, southwestern Amazonia experienced the effects of an intense drought that affected life and biodiversity. Several major tributaries as well as parts of the main river itself contained only a fraction of their normal volumes of water, and lakes were drying up. The consequences for local people, animals and the forest itself are impossible to estimate now, but they are likely to be serious. The analyses indicate that the drought was manifested as weak peak river season during autumn to winter as a consequence of a weak summertime season in southwestern Amazonia; the winter season was also accompanied by rainfall that sometimes reached 25% of the climatic value, being anomalously warm and dry and helping in the propagation of fires. Analyses of climatic and hydrological records in Amazonia suggest a broad consensus that the 2005 drought was linked not to El Niño as with most previous droughts in the Amazon, but to warming sea surface temperatures in the tropical North Atlantic Ocean.

Land-use and climate change risks in the Amazon and the need of a novel sustainable development paradigm

Significance The Amazonian tropical forests have been disappearing at a fast rate in the last 50 y due to deforestation to open areas for agriculture, posing high risks of irreversible changes to biodiversity and ecosystems. Climate change poses additional risks to the stability of the forests. Studies suggest “tipping points” not to be transgressed: 4° C of global warming or 40% of total deforested area. The regional development debate has focused on attempting to reconcile maximizing conservation with intensification of traditional agriculture. Large reductions of deforestation in the last decade open up opportunities for an alternative model based on seeing the Amazon as a global public good of biological assets for the creation of high-value products and ecosystem services. For half a century, the process of economic integration of the Amazon has been based on intensive use of renewable and nonrenewable natural resources, which has brought significant basin-wide environmental alterations. The rural development in the Amazonia pushed the agricultural frontier swiftly, resulting in widespread land-cover change, but agriculture in the Amazon has been of low productivity and unsustainable. The loss of biodiversity and continued deforestation will lead to high risks of irreversible change of its tropical forests. It has been established by modeling studies that the Amazon may have two “tipping points,” namely, temperature increase of 4 °C or deforestation exceeding 40% of the forest area. If transgressed, large-scale “savannization” of mostly southern and eastern Amazon may take place. The region has warmed about 1 °C over the last 60 y, and total deforestation is reaching 20% of the forested area. The recent significant reductions in deforestation—80% reduction in the Brazilian Amazon in the last decade—opens up opportunities for a novel sustainable development paradigm for the future of the Amazon. We argue for a new development paradigm—away from only attempting to reconcile maximizing conservation versus intensification of traditional agriculture and expansion of hydropower capacity—in which we research, develop, and scale a high-tech innovation approach that sees the Amazon as a global public good of biological assets that can enable the creation of innovative high-value products, services, and platforms through combining advanced digital, biological, and material technologies of the Fourth Industrial Revolution in progress.

Extreme rainfall, vulnerability and risk: a continental-scale assessment for South America

Extreme weather continues to preoccupy society as a formidable public safety concern bearing huge economic costs. While attention has focused on global climate change and how it could intensify key elements of the water cycle such as precipitation and river discharge, it is the conjunction of geophysical and socioeconomic forces that shapes human sensitivity and risks to weather extremes. We demonstrate here the use of high-resolution geophysical and population datasets together with documentary reports of rainfall-induced damage across South America over a multi-decadal, retrospective time domain (1960–2000). We define and map extreme precipitation hazard, exposure, affectedpopulations, vulnerability and risk, and use these variables to analyse the impact of floods as a water security issue. Geospatial experiments uncover major sources of risk from natural climate variability and population growth, with change in climate extremes bearing a minor role. While rural populations display greatest relative sensitivity to extreme rainfall, urban settings show the highest rates of increasing risk. In the coming decades, rapid urbanization will make South American cities the focal point of future climate threats but also an opportunity for reducing vulnerability, protecting lives and sustaining economic development through both traditional and ecosystem-based disaster risk management systems.

Long-term potential for tropical-forest degradation due to deforestation and fires in the Brazilian Amazon.

Biome models of the global climate-vegetation relationships indicate that most of the Brazilian Amazon has potential for being covered by tropical forests. From current land-use processes observed in the region, however, substantial deforestation and fire activity have been verified in large portions of the region, particularly along the Arc of Deforestation. In a first attempt to evaluate the long-term potential for tropical-forest degradation due to deforestation and fires in the Brazilian Amazon, we analysed large-scale data on fire activity and climate factors that drive the distribution of tropical forests in the region. The initial analyses and results from this study lead to important details on the relations between these quantities and have important implications for building future parameterizations of the vulnerability of tropical forests in the region.

Forest edge burning in the Brazilian Amazon promoted by escaping fires from managed pastures

Understanding to what extent different land uses influence fire occurrence in the Amazonian forest is particularly relevant for its conservation. We evaluate the relationship between forest fires and different anthropogenic activities linked to a variety of land uses in the Brazilian states of Mato Grosso, Para, and Rondonia. We combine the new high-resolution (30 m) TerraClass land use database with Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer burned area data for 2008 and the extreme dry year of 2010. Excluding the non-forest class, most of the burned area was found in pastures, primary and secondary forests, and agricultural lands across all three states, while only around 1% of the total was located in deforested areas. The trend in burned area did not follow the declining deforestation rates from 2001 to 2010, and the spatial overlap between deforested and burned areas was only 8% on average. This supports the claim of deforestation being disconnected from burning since 2005. Forest degradation showed an even lower correlation with burned area. We found that fires used in managing pastoral and agricultural lands that escape into the neighboring forests largely contribute to forest fires. Such escaping fires are responsible for up to 52% of the burned forest edges adjacent to burned pastures and up to 22% of the burned forest edges adjacent to burned agricultural fields, respectively. Our findings call for the development of control and monitoring plans to prevent fires from escaping from managed lands into forests to support effective land use and ecosystem management.

Response of the Amazon Tropical Forests to Deforestation, Climate, and Extremes, and the Occurrence of Drought and Fire

To the extent that many studies of the last two decades deepen the understanding about the Amazon tropical forest and more is known about the environmental services it offers, they also increased our level of awareness about the growing threats that this system has been subjected to. In addition to the process of uncontrolled expansion of the agriculture frontier, the Amazon, for its large scale, is an ecosystem highly susceptible to climate at regional and global scales. In this chapter we address issues related to environmental drivers of change in the Amazon: deforestation, climate, climate extremes, and fire. The goal is to present aspects of a synergistic action of these effects and the possible responses of Amazonian ecosystems to these drivers of change: (1) short-term responses as the mortality of some species (biodiversity loss), loss of living biomass with consequent influence on storage, and exchanges of carbon with the atmosphere to (2) long-term responses, such as ‘savannization’ and Amazon dieback. On the other hand, it has been hypothesized that the forest may show some degree of resilience to tolerate those impacts before starting to respond with degradation of the ecosystems. One of the challenges of Amazonian science today is to find out how close those drivers might be from exceeding ‘tipping points’ of stability of the Amazonian system.

Assessing the Possible Impacts of a 4 °C or Higher Warming in Amazonia

The Amazonian forest’s ability to provide environmental services is threatened by anthropogenic forcing at various scales, such as deforestation, fire, global and regional climate change, and extreme events. In addition to the impacts resulting from each one of these drivers, the synergistic effects potentially increase the risks. In the light of the above, this chapter aims to evaluate the future prospects for the Amazon in a scenario of 4 °C or higher warming resulting from anthropogenic climate change and the related hydrological cycle changes. Future climate scenarios project progressively higher warming that may exceed 4 °C in Amazonia in the second half of the century, particularly during the dry season in the region. Associated with these scenarios, it is projected a reduction of precipitation year-round, being a substantial reduction predominantly in the dry and transition seasons and smaller reductions of the order of 5% for the SH summer. Evaluating the consequences of such substantial climatic change, several negative effects in Amazonia can be anticipated, including short-term hydrological changes similar to the events associated to the extreme 2005 and 2010 droughts, and longer time-scale modifications of broad scale characteristics such as different biome distribution. Based on hydrological models, it is generally expected a reduction in river discharges associated to precipitation decreases and temperature increases brought about by projected climate change, but with the magnitude of the changes differing between models. The future climate change scenarios imply important changes in biomes distribution over Amazonia, with potential expansion of savannah and caatinga over large areas currently occupied by tropical forests. It is necessary a reduction to nearly zero in tropical deforestation and reducing land-cover emissions and mitigating climate change to avoid a dangerous interference with the ability of natural ecosystems to adapt to these possible changes.

A webmapping platform for publishing, sharing, and managing EO-derived data for forest protection

Ecometrica, together with partners in the UK, Mexico and Brazil, have collaborated on a UK Space Agency international partnership space programme (IPSP) project to advance EO applications in forests. A key objective was to improve EO derived information management for forest protection. Ecometrica’s cloud-based mapping platform was used to establish regional EO Labs within the partner organizations: ECOSUR (Mexico), INPE and FUNCATE (Brazil) and the University of Edinburgh (UK). The regional networks of EO Labs have provided a unified view of forestry-related data that is easy to access. In Mexico and Brazil the EO Labs enabled collaboration between research organisations and NGOs to develop applications for monitoring forest change in specified study areas and has enabled the compilation of previously unavailable regional EO and other spatial datasets into products that can be used by researchers, NGOs and state governments. Data on forest loss was linked to dynamic earth system models developed by the University of Edinburgh and INPE, utilising the EO Labs to provide an intuitive and powerful environment in which non-expert end- users can investigate the results from the huge datasets produced by multi-run model simulations. This paper demonstrates and discusses examples of mapping applications created on Ecometrica EO Labs by ECOSUR, INPE and the University of Edinburgh as part of this project, illustrating how cloud technology can enhance the field of forest protection.