Earth’s lungs on fire

Earth’s lungs on fire

The Amazon rain-forest, said to be the lungs of the earth, our only home, is on fire for the past few weeks, and the fire is only increasing each passing day. In fact, the Amazon rain-forest alone produces 20 per cent of our planet’s oxygen; and with a series of fire already destroying a sizeable portion of the world’s richest and largest forest, it has already started ringing alarm bells. It is indeed an ecological disaster that the world never experienced before, and is rapidly also escalating into a global political crisis too. While the Amazon rain-forest has been suffering from multiple fires every year, the fire incidents in the current year have been unbelievably high. The number of fires in the Amazon so far this year has been more than 74,000, which is the highest since 2010, Brazil’s National Institute of Space Research agency, which tracks deforestation and forest fires using satellite images, has said. The agency has also revealed that Brazil’s stretch of the Amazon has lost more than 40,000 acres of forest cover during the first seven months of the year, a dangerous 39 per cent increase over the same period last year. While the loss of forest cover is almost permanent because it will not be possible to develop such rich forest within the next couple of decades, what is of more serious concern is that toxic smoke emanating from the fires is so intense that darkness has begun to fall hours before the sunset in Sao Paulo, Brazil’s financial capital and the largest city in the Western Hemisphere. The Amazon is the world’s largest and most diverse tract of rainforest, with millions of species and billions of trees. It stores vast amounts of planet-warming carbon dioxide apart from producing 20 per cent of the planet’s oxygen. But, the most disgusting aspect of the Amazon fires is that climate change is not the primary cause of the present wildfires. The Amazon fires are in fact not wildfires at all. These fires were not triggered off by any kind of lightning strike or a snapping power line. The reality is that they have been ignited. Though the Brazilian government initially attempted to pass it off as a routine forest fire, the revelation that the fire in the world’s largest tropical rain forest was actually ignited has already led to an international outrage. European leaders have threatened to cancel a major trade deal with Brazil, while protesters have staged a series of demonstrations outside Brazilian embassies and call for a boycott of Brazilian products have increased manifold on social media. This has compelled Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro to send the military to enforce environmental laws and to help contain the fires on Saturday. President Bolsonaro has been particularly alarmed over the mood of the upcoming G7 summit that begins in Paris, with French President Emmanuel Macron saying the ‘international crisis’ of Amazon should be on the top of the summit’s agenda. The Amazon river basin stretches over an area of 70 lakh sq km, of which about a 5.5 million sq km area – roughly two and a half times the size of India – spanning across countries comprises the densest rainforest on earth. While there were about 90 billion trees in the rainforest in 2013, the number is said to have steeply decreased in the past six years, particularly in the Brazil portion, with fire accounting for most of it, followed by illegal and indiscriminate felling. Scientists and environmentalist across the world have been raising concern that tropical rainforests everywhere in the world are critical in the fight against climate change. These are large-scale sites that store carbon dioxide, keeping the greenhouse gas in its solid carbon state as soil, branches, and leaves. Given the kind of temperature rise and weather deflections in Assam and the Northeast, it is time a lesson was learnt from the Amazon crisis, and effective steps are taken at the earliest to not only save the region’s rich forests, but to also increase them as quickly as possible.

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