The numbers are difficult to even comprehend. By late January, with many sections of Australia still ablaze, the nation’s latest fire season had left more than 27 million acres burned (an area roughly the size of Virginia) and at least 30 people dead, and had produced a smoke plume large enough to cover the continental U.S. By one estimate, over a billion animals perished.
“It’s such a big number, you forget how much suffering is involved,” says Gerardo Huertas, who leads disaster operations and risk reduction worldwide for the global nonprofit World Animal Protection (and who recently traveled to Australia to provide technical assistance). “Animals can’t necessarily outrun the fires, and they can’t escape them by climbing into trees. Koalas, for instance, live in eucalyptus trees, which catch fire like they’re made of gasoline.”
Some wildfires were so hot they generated their own storm systems, which then spread fire even further through lightning strikes. One such strike was responsible for the fire tornado on Kangaroo Island—a wildlife sanctuary with such a high level of biodiversity it’s been likened to Noah’s Ark—where half the island’s koala population, which numbered around 50,000, was feared dead.
Wildfires have always occurred naturally, but the intensity of these particular fires is unprecedented, and while poor land management plays a role, so does human-caused climate change. Last year was the hottest and driest in Australia since the country began keeping records 109 years ago. And the fires there are just the latest in a series of uniquely intense wildfires around the world. “There were the fires in the Amazon, then California, then Borneo, and now Australia—the scale of these fires is much worse than it has ever been,” says Sebastian Troëng, executive vice president of the environmental nonprofit Conservation International. “It makes you wonder where will be next.”
It also makes you wonder what can be done. One potential way forward was suggested by a study in the journal Science last July, which found that there is enough vacant land on the planet to sustain an additional 2.25 billion acres of forest without shrinking cities or farms. Once these forests matured, they could store more than 200 gigatons of carbon, helping counteract roughly two-thirds of all man-made carbon emissions.
In 2017, Conservation International made reforestation a key part of its climate change strategy and launched a program to restore 70,000 acres, or about 73 million trees, in the Brazilian Amazon. “To avoid the climate tipping point, we have to cut our emissions in half by 2030,” says Nikola Alexandre, a restoration fellow at the organization. (Since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, the world has warmed by 1.8 degrees Fahrenheit; many scientists suggest the tipping point could occur with a warming of 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit.) “But we’re no longer in a position to only reduce emissions. We have to actively remove carbon from the atmosphere. From our perspective, the most cost-effective way to do that is by bringing areas that have been damaged back to life.”
When most people think of reforestation, they envision planting saplings in the ground. But newly planted trees often require a fair amount of care, especially if they aren’t native to the area; even if they do thrive, the resulting monocultural forests are not as biologically diverse as naturally growing forests. Thus the process Conservation International supports in the Amazon—which is derived from the practices of indigenous people—instead involves spreading a mixture of around 90 different native seeds. In addition to being cost-effective and low-maintenance, this method produces thick growth that can absorb up to 40 times more carbon than a monocultural forest.
Engaging those who live in the area and making sure the process benefits them economically is essential, says Mauricio Bianco, vice president of Conservation International–Brazil, since “if you don’t see a value in the forest, you cut it down.” In Brazil, all Amazon landowners must maintain up to 80 percent of their land as forest, and many of the acres Conservation International hopes can be regenerated have been provided by farmers trying to come into compliance with the law.
Indigenous people are paid to collect seeds and then spread them by hand; farmers also spread the seeds with soybean machinery. Scientists have suggested that if 20 to 25 percent of theAmazon is cleared, it could reach its own tipping point and become a savanna. Already, 17 percent is gone. “If we lose the Amazon, we are not going to reach what we need to do in terms of the global climate emergency,” Bianco says. “What Conservation International is doing is a drop in the ocean of what is needed, but it’s important to start somewhere.”
AMAZONIA BY THE NUMBERS
30,000,000 people live in the Amazon River basin—the populations of Tokyo, Mexico City, and New York City combined.
10% of all known species live in the Amazon rain forest.
2.7° Fahrenheit: The tipping point at which climate change could upend life as we know it.
$18,500,000: What Ecuador received from the Green Climate Fund for cutting its deforestation rate in half over the past two decades.
Source: Conservation International
GET INVOLVED: Visit conservation.org to find out how you can help the organization’s reforestation efforts in the Amazon and around the world. Learn more about Australia’s bushfire emergency and how you can help at worldanimalprotection.us.
This article originally appeared in the April 2020 issue of ELLE.
