Unprecedented Amazon Drought?

By Paul Homewood

h/y Paul Kolk

Another “worse than ever” story!

 

The Amazon rainforest experienced its worst drought on record in 2023. Many villages became unreachable by river, wildfires raged and wildlife died. Some scientists worry events like these are a sign that the world’s biggest forest is fast approaching a point of no return.

As the cracked and baking river bank towers up on either side of us, Oliveira Tikuna is starting to have doubts about this journey. He’s trying to get to his village, in a metal canoe built to navigate the smallest creeks of the Amazon.

Bom Jesus de Igapo Grande is a community of 40 families in the middle of the forest and has been badly affected by the worst drought recorded in the region.

There was no water to shower. Bananas, cassava, chestnuts and acai crops spoiled because they can’t get to the city fast enough.

And the head of the village, Oliveira’s father, warned anyone elderly or unwell to move closer to town, because they are dangerously far from a hospital.

Oliveira wanted to show us what was happening. He warned it would be a long trip.

But as we turn from the broad Solimões river into the creek that winds towards his village, even he is taken aback. In parts it’s reduced to a trickle no more than 1m (3.3ft) wide. Before long, the boat is lodged in the river bed. It’s time to get out and pull.

"I’m 49 years old, we’ve never seen anything like this before," Oliveira says. "I’ve never even heard of a drought as bad as this."

After three hours of trudging up the drying stream, we give up and turn back.

"If it dries out any more than that, my family will be isolated there," Oliveira says.

To get in or out they’ll have to walk across a lakebed on the other side of the village. But that’s dangerous – there are snakes and alligators there.

The rainy season in the Amazon should have started in October but it was still dry and hot until late November. This is an effect of the cyclical El Niño weather pattern, amplified by climate change.

El Niño causes water to warm in the Pacific Ocean, which pushes heated air over the Americas. This year the water in the North Atlantic has also been abnormally warm, and hot, dry air has enveloped the Amazon.

"When it was my first drought I thought, ‘Wow, this is awful. How can this happen to the rainforest?’" says Flávia Costa, a plant ecologist at the National Institute for Amazonian Research, who has been living and working in the rainforest for 26 years.

"And then, year after year, it was record-breaking. Each drought was stronger than before."

She says it’s too soon to assess how much damage this year’s drought has done, but her team has found many plants "showing signs of being dead.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-latin-america-67751685

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How often do we see these sort of claims by locals, that they have never “seen anything like it before”? All amplified of course by the BBC, who fail to provide any actual data at all to support the claims.

In fact the data provided by the World Bank shows that the Amazon is actually getting wetter since 1960:

https://climateknowledgeportal.worldbank.org/country-profiles

There is always drought in the region during strong El Nino events. But there is no evidence that this year’s is any worse than before.

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Emissions

As an addendum, the World Bank report also says this about Brazil’s NDC submitted at Paris:

In reality emissions are still 28% higher than in 2005, and show little sign of coming down. A microcosm, I suspect of what is happening everywhere outside of the Western World:

BP Energy Review