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America is a rich continent that is being destroyed. These are your most pressing environmental issues

2022-06-08T14:53:02.113Z


 The Americas are rich. A quick look at the rankings of biodiversity and freshwater reserves is enough to prove it. And yet, they are increasingly confronted with the list of extreme weather events exacerbated by climate change that we have memorized by now — hurricanes, droughts, heat waves, scarcity — and the destruction of the Amazon, which is not just their lung, but the lung of the planet. | United States | CNN


Concern grows over massive deforestation in Argentina 4:14

(CNN Spanish) -- 

The Americas are rich.

A quick look at the rankings of biodiversity and freshwater reserves is enough to prove it.

And yet, they are increasingly confronted with the list of extreme weather events exacerbated by climate change that we have memorized by now — hurricanes, droughts, heat waves, scarcity — and the destruction of the Amazon, which is not just their lung, but the lung of the planet.

The Summit of the Americas meets this 2022 under the slogan "Building a sustainable, resilient and equitable future".

The data indicates, however, that this is not precisely what we are achieving.

An inescapable word: Amazon

Talking about the most urgent environmental problems in America implies talking, first of all, about the deforestation of the Amazon.

Since President Jair Bolsonaro took power in 2019, the destruction of the Amazon has increased.

Bolsonaro weakened environmental protections, arguing that they hampered economic development.

Now the president has signed a decree to increase punishments for environmental crimes such as illegal logging and afforestation, in what could be understood as a step to fulfill the promise to improve environmental protection that he made at COP26.

However, the figures stand alone: ​​deforestation reached a 15-year record in 2021, according to data from the country's Institute for Space Research.

And 2022 does not advance with a better perspective: satellite images of the center reveal that in the first four months there was another maximum.

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A 2021 UN report estimated the weight of deforestation in greenhouse gas emissions at 10%.

And in Brazil, in addition, the elections are approaching and some scientists predict that deforestation will increase in this period, as it has happened before the last three elections.

Based on satellite data from the last two decades, a group of scientists recently established that about three-quarters of the Amazon shows signs of "loss of resilience," which implies a reduced ability to recover from logging, fires, and storm surges. droughts, among other phenomena.

In fact, they say, it is at a "tipping point" and could stop being a tropical forest to become a savannah.

2500, the apocalyptic year due to climate change 0:45

And here a key term must be introduced to understand the dimension of the problem: irreversibility, Paula Caballero, regional director for Latin America of the organization The Nature Conservancy, explains to CNN en Español.

"We talk about renewable natural resources and it turns out that they are not renewable and even less in the face of climate change scenarios," she says.

Hand in hand with the destruction of the Amazon and other ecosystems comes the loss of biodiversity.

There are plenty of figures, for example those from the World Wildlife Fund, which stated that by 2020 Latin America had registered a reduction of 94%, well above the global average of 68%.

SPECIAL: Summit of the Americas

The Extreme Weather Events Devastating America

Extreme weather events, made worse by climate change, are devastating America.

Just go back to 2020 and remember how, just days apart, hurricanes Eta and Iota wiped out entire communities from the map, affecting more than nine million people in Central America.

The following year, Hurricane Ida made landfall in Louisiana, killing more than 50 people.

The economic damage it caused was valued at US$75 billion.

The sample and destruction was such that the committee in charge of defining the names of the hurricanes decided to remove that option from the list.

For the future, the outlook is not encouraging: the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, known by the acronym in English IPCC, predicts that tropical cyclones, as well as strong storms and dust storms, will become more extreme in the east coast and the gulf coast of the United States, the Caribbean and Central America.

And of course it's not just about hurricanes.

The western United States, where the period from 2000 to 2021 was the driest in more than 1,200 years, today provides the clearest picture of another of the events exacerbated by climate change that devastate regions of the Americas: drought.

By May of this year, 80% of Mexico was facing some degree of drought, aggravated by heat waves and lack of rain.

New records in droughts, hurricanes, rains and heat 1:19

(This giant of America also suffers from water scarcity. More than 50 million people faced perennial or seasonal water scarcity in urban areas by 2016, according to research published in the journal

Nature

, which also places it as one of the countries where this problem will get worse. Their situation was, by that year, the most compromised in Latin America, especially in the north).

Droughts have also wreaked havoc in Brazil, Paraguay and Argentina where, for example, in the province of San Juan, one of the worst water crises in the last 100 years was experienced at the end of 2021.

Heat waves, the extreme weather phenomenon that claims the most lives, also devastate the continent and, according to the IPCC, the change in temperatures in North and Central America is already greater than the world average and, in all projected scenarios In the future, temperatures and extreme high temperatures will continue to rise.

In South America, temperatures will also continue to rise above the world average.

A crisis that goes hand in hand with the climate crisis and explodes on the US-Mexico border.

The destruction caused by the hurricanes, in turn, and the lack of resilience of agriculture in the face of climate change, have been factors that, together with the pandemic, have driven migration to the United States, aggravating the border crisis.

"These new waves of migration do not have so much to do with an intention to improve the quality of life or improve the economic position, but because people do not have to eat," Natalia Lever, director for Latin America of The Climate Reality Project, the non-profit organization founded by former US Vice President and Nobel Peace Prize winner Al Gore.

And this crisis is "inevitable unless we start investing in these new technologies for climate-resilient and sustainable agriculture and also in greater job opportunities in this new green economy," she says.

  • Migration on the continent: this is the situation that the Summit of the Americas must address

Root cause"

That said, keep in mind that the Americas, so far, have suffered less from climate change compared to other regions of the world such as Africa and areas of Southeast Asia, in addition to its enormous abundance of natural resources.

The "root cause" of the difficulties facing Latin America, according to Caballero, is that it has not understood that economic growth and equity "have to do with rational, sustainable and equitable management of our natural resources."

"In Latin America we have never really understood our development, our performance, our economic future linked to natural resources because we have a purely extractivist and extractive vision of resources," he says.

There is no better example than our own language.

In Colombia, explains Caballero, there is the concept of "uncultivated land" and "if you ask a Colombian what is an uncultivated territory, he will tell you that it is an unproductive territory that must be intervened to make it productive. And It turns out that vacant land, like undesignated land in Brazil, is nothing less than the most productive ecosystem from an environmental and therefore socioeconomic perspective."

The cost to farmers

Latin America is responsible for about 25% of the world's agricultural and fishery production, recalls Paula.

The lack of resilience in agricultural activity is another great challenge.

In fact, close to half of food production is in the hands of small producers who are the ones "who are seeing their ability to produce food to support their families absolutely wiped out" by extreme weather events exacerbated by climate change, Knight explains.

And in the current context of war, he says, we must bear in mind that the pressure may increase for Latin America to produce more without prioritizing sustainable production.

"If we don't transform the way we do agriculture and make it more resilient" to the ravages of climate change, "we are putting at risk not only our own food security, but also an increase in food prices at the local level," he says. for his part Lever.

Here comes into play a word that is repeated in every report and summit: adaptation.

Increased investment is needed to adapt to climate change.

In the adaptation, explains Caballero, is where "there is a perfect conjugation that sustainability and equity are two sides of the same coin."

NASA dire warning about corn crops 0:37

What about greenhouse gas emissions?

Avoiding a catastrophic trajectory requires a drastic and rapid reduction in greenhouse gas emissions (where, in addition to carbon dioxide, methane also stands out, associated with livestock farming among other activities, and which has short-term warming power far superior to that of its more famous companion).

In this campaign to cut emissions, two names are usually the main protagonists: the United States and China.

President Joe Biden committed just over a year ago to a nearly 50% reduction in emissions by 2030.

What about the rest of America?

"We are a region that is growing and to the extent that we are growing, energy demands are also growing," explains Lever.

It is essential to change the models of production and consumption "because otherwise a wave of enormous emissions will come."

America's debt in land ownership

Another "serious problem," according to Caballero, is access to and ownership of land, "and in particular the need to recognize the contribution of indigenous peoples and communities."

In the Amazon alone there are more than 6,000 indigenous territories and protected areas that cover almost 50% of that territory, which shows how they are a "cornerstone of conservation".

However, these are territories "strongly threatened" by the expansion of the agricultural frontier, attempts to change their types of protection and concessions for extractive activities, among other factors.

"Promoting legal ownership and recognized ownership of all that are collective territories in Latin America is absolutely fundamental."

The pandemic did not achieve the necessary change

The pandemic brought to the fore the link between human beings and the environment, fostering debate on how human intervention in natural habitats can also affect health, promoting the circulation of viruses with the potential to infect humans.

Furthermore, 2020 allowed us to see directly what would happen if emissions were reduced and ecosystems were given a break.

But the breath was short.

The changes did not hold.

Of the recovery budgets against covid-19, according to ECLAC, less than 0.5% have been allocated to projects that can be considered green, recalls Caballero.

And in budget cuts due to crises, the so-called "environmental sector" always loses.

Newly discovered Amazon species could go extinct 0:52

The intention to make a change exists "but there is a long way to go to achieve an effective implementation," he says.

And it's not about stopping development, he says, but about "keeping development options open for the future."

climate crisis

Source: cnnespanol

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