Amazon Forest Fires Pushing Climate Change ‘Beyond Human Control’

Leading Amazon scientist highlights ‘grave problems’ in Brazil’s management of the world’s most important forest as climate-driven fires eat it away.

As in many parts of the world, the climate of the Amazon is undergoing dramatic changes.  Droughts and floods happen more often, as well as forest fires.

But in recent years, Brazil’s government, which holds the largest swathe of the biggest tropical forest in the world, has privileged economic interests over preservation, according to one of the world’s leading experts on the region and its environment.

Philip Fearnside, a US-born professor at Brazil’s National Institute for Research in Amazonia (INPA), has researched the Amazon for three decades.  In an interview with Climate Home in his office in Manaus, he explains how climate change is driving forest fires through the most important forest on earth, creating a cycle of carbon emissions that threatens to push beyond human’s capacity to control it.  He also criticizes Brazil’s government for their favoring of industry and explains the country’s peculiar relationship to its own laws.

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