Sunday, September 1, 2019

The Burning Season


Bolivia is in a state of uproar, at least on social media, over the massive wildfires in southeastern part of the country.  At least one million hectares have burned since the 5th of August according to the Bolivian Forest Authority[1],[2].  It turns out that Brazil is in an uproar as well, with over 70,000 fires identified, 85% more than last year according to many sources[3],[4].  It also turns out that Paraguay is on fire, and if you go out further, it turns out that Sub-Saharan Africa is on fire[5] (Figure 1).   We have had massive fires recently in Alaska, Portugal and Siberia and already July was the hottest month for the world since records began[6].  Now, Huffington Post makes a case that “The entire global economy is complicit in the destruction of the Amazon”[7]. While I would agree with that statement, Figure 1, also shows that the basic problem extends beyond the Amazon to the tropics in general.
Figure 1. Screen capture from NASA image reflecting heat focci.[8]

In the tropics the burning season is a yearly occurrence although this time there are a few differences: it is relatively early for the fires in the Amazon and Pantanal areas and the scale is ominous, as is the concern that we are in feedback loops with climate change (more, farther down).  In any case every year at this time, a huge outcry emerges shouting the following questions:

“This is horrible, why doesn’t somebody do something?”
“Why do people burn so much in the Amazon?”
“So whose fault is this situation?

The good news (actually, least bad news) is that the burning season is a yearly occurrence and people forget about it once the rains begin and everything greens over.  Though earlier than usual in the Amazon, so far 2019 is within the range of the last 15 years, according to NASA[9], and still not yet as bad as 2010 in terms of area burned.  The worst burns in Bolivia have occurred around the Chiquitano Dry Forest which is actually in the Rio de la Plata basin. This is a very combustible part of the country with frequent burns but this year has been particularly extensive.

The bad news is that it has been essentially “this bad” for the last 30 years and people are not generally aware of it.  The really, really bad news is that many of us have been working on alternatives to burning, deforestation and related land degradation in the tropics for well over 30 years and we have not significantly altered the trends. I, along with my late wife, have had a farm in the Bolivian Amazon for 21 years for the express purpose of evaluating alternatives to burning and can confirm there is no golden bullet.

The extremely bad news is that there are policies that governments can take to slow or reverse these trends, if they are given priority.  However, President Bolsonaro and President Morales, though in theory at opposite ends of the political spectrum, have coincided in policies that proudly encourage the conversion of tropical forests to crop and grazing land. Bolsonaro was elected on a platform of weakening conservation efforts and “developing” the Amazon.  While touting a devotion to Mother Earth, only a month ago Evo Morales proudly announced an initiative, and a new law, to expand the agricultural frontier in Bolivia by 5 million hectares[10], following on three other related laws since 2015.  Both policies absolutely, necessarily, go through the burning (whether previously cut or not) of natural tropical forest.

So now that it is clear who is directly to blame for the ‘2019 Inferno’, the question that few people ask is “what is to be done?  Even fewer ask:

How successful have previous efforts been to counter deforestation and burning, and what can we learn from them?

My dissertation, in the mid-80s, was on alternatives to slash and burn in Bolivia[11],  and I quickly tired of international conferences that repeated over and over again how bad the deforestation was, how accurately the rates of deforestation could be measured, and the dire consequences of the deforestation, including climate change (yes this was clear 30 years ago.)  What was emphasized less was the analysis of alternatives.  The people on the ground, “Local Resource Users (LRU)”, are the ones who actually cut the trees, hunt and/or start fires, for whatever reason (more, below).  For the burning and deforestation to cease, there have to be other alternatives that are more attractive to the LRUs.  Brazil tried very hard for many years to control the fires with punitive measures, using satellites and helicopters, but you can´t throw millions of farmers and ranchers into jail.  ‘Not burning’ has to be more attractive than ‘burning’ to the LRU, for the burning to stop.  30 years later, burning is still more attractive to most locals, and as pointed out, our governments are actively encouraging it, and the world economy is complicit.

OK, so what should we do?

At this point it is useful to review the global prevalence of burning in the tropics, and the reasons behind it.  Each year in our part of the world the ‘burning season’ is marked by fires, charred landscapes and overall – smoke. This has been going on for as long as I can remember.  In Bolivia, from mid-June until the end of September the smoke becomes increasingly pervasive. Land that a few months previously was covered in lush vegetation, is reduced to smoldering stumps, logs and other tree fragments (Figure 2).  In the Bolivian lowlands, each year seems to be smokier than the last, which is to say nearly intolerable. You see so much smoke that you wonder if the rains will ever come again.

Figure 2 My neighbor’s land after slashing and burning tall secondary forest near Rurrenabaque, Bolivia in 2015.  Photo: Dan Robison
The 15th of September is traditionally considered to be the worst day for smoke in the southern Amazon.  I made a memorable trip on that date down a highway in Rondonia, Brazil in 1992.  We literally had to pull the vehicle over from time to time because the smoke was too thick to drive safely.   Each year regional airports all over the Amazonia are officially closed when the visibility becomes unacceptable.  A few years ago, there was a report of a pilot who was not able to land a small aircraft on an airstrip in a national park in Northern Brazil due to the smoke from nearby burning.  He could not even see the tip of his wings.

It is, importantly, not just Amazonia where massive burning occurs each year in tropical forest and savanna areas. Altogether I count 17 countries just in Central and South America where slash and burn agriculture is present in the humid and sub-humid areas.  In these same countries it is difficult to distinguish smoke from burning forest slashed for agriculture, from the yearly burns that occur on the vast grazing lands in the same regions (Figure 3).

Figure 3. Yearly burning in natural savannas in Beni, Bolivia, within the Amazon Basin and not far from Rondonia, the epicenter of Brazil´s worse burning and deforestation.  Photo:  Gabriela Villanueva, August 2019.

Though great social differences exist, similar practices are repeated in other tropical and subtropical regions of the world.  For example, in South East Asia, there is a yearly phenomenon where a huge haze cloud forms over the region and builds up progressively until the major rains come[12]. Some years the airports in Jakarta and Kuala Lumpur have to shut down.  Indonesia blames Malaysia and Malaysia blames Indonesia.  The burning is attributed to deforestation, burning peat and more vaguely to slash and burn agriculture[13]. What is not generally mentioned is that this form of agriculture has historically been an important land use from the northeastern part of India across Burma, Thailand, Laos, Cambodia, Viet Nam, Indonesia, Malaysia and Papua New Guinea.  In general terms it is common to have rice paddies in the lowlands, and slash and burn agriculture in the highlands.  In Asia it is less common to have cattle grazing lands, but where they occur there is similar burning. Recently the problem of smoke from burning crop stubble in India has reportedly resulted in intolerable air quality in the main cities[14].

In sub-Saharan Africa slash and burn agriculture can be considered to be the dominant land use in many areas where there is enough rainfall that the natural vegetation would be forest or tall “guinea” savanna (Figure 4). In dryer areas the savannah burns many if not most years, even inside National Parks[15]. Together these explain the extremely widespread burns illustrated in Figure 1.

Figure 4. My sister, surrounded by recently burned guinea savannah in Burkina Faso (then Upper Volta) in 1982.  The topsoil would subsequently be gathered into mounds to plant crops, then left fallow to return to grass for a few years. Photo. Dan Robison

Again some “good news” is that across the world, these burning seasons vary with latitude, and are generally offset in the northern and southern hemisphere due their generally opposite rainy and dry seasons.  This means that while the smog cloud in SE Asia is disappearing due to the onset of the rainy season, the smoke clouds are just beginning to build up in the Amazon.  Part of the problem is that when it eventually rains, the land, on average, greens up, the atmosphere clears and people forget about it until the next burning season (Compare Figures 5 and 6).

Figure 5. Another neighbor’s land just after a burn, near Rurrenabaque, Bolivia. 2nd burn after tall forest, 2010.  Photo Dan Robison.

Figure 6. The same pasture on my neighbor´s land (in figure 5), 2 years later, after most of the logs had rotted.  Photo Dan Robison

For the time being we will not distinguish between African, Asian or American systems. Suffice it to know that there are many, many millions of farmers and grazers (LRUs) of many cultures and languages, that deliberately slash and burn, or just burn, the vegetation to create the conditions for crop or fodder growth.  Many millions of people did this before the oldest person in the world was born. That the burns frequently get out of control, that the extended and frequent burns degrade the land and can even increase “the need” to burn, are separate issues.

The best, scientific, analysis of this phenomenon in Africa, and really the whole world, was published in 1960. The Soil Under Shifting Cultivation[16].  Though less and less of the burning can be attributed to shifting cultivation, and more and more to grazing, the fundamental rationales remain.  In many ways our knowledge has not improved much since that book, especially in the most important way, “How can we finally, permanently, alter these practices?   

Next, it is important to understand that the burning occurs in broadly four scenarios.  1. Traditionally, around the world where the natural vegetation is tropical forest, a small area of forest is cleared, burned and a variety of crops are planted into the ashes.  The ashes temporarily fertilize the ground and lower the soil acidity, while the fire kills unwanted plants, diseases and insects.  Both generally make food and fiber production possible especially on acid soils.   After the crops are harvested the land is allowed to go back to forest (known as the fallow period) and after varying periods of time the cycle is repeated: forest is cleared again, burned again, cropped again and left fallow again.

Where this system is practiced with low population density and high human knowledge (some indigenous communities) the system is carbon-neutral (the fallow eventually reacquires the carbon and nitrogen oxidized in the burn) and can actually increase overall biodiversity by driving succession[17].  It can be considered to be cropping in rotation with natural forests.  Where population density is higher the fallow periods are not long enough to restore carbon stocks and the land enters a process of degradation (figure 7).  In both these cases the LRUs are generally considered quite poor.  No farmer ever got wealthy from shifting cultivation or slash and burn agriculture.

Figure 7. Slash and burn or shifting cultivation mosaic in Arunachal Pradesh, India.  Photo. Dan Robison.

2. The second scenario is in tropical pastures, essentially for cattle, where burns occur nearly every year.  In some cases tropical forest is slashed and burned directly to create pastures, in some cases land that was formerly under shifting cultivation is consolidated into grazing lands and in many cases there is natural grassland, with grasses that have limited use for cattle and are burned yearly to control woody species and provide more palatable regrowth.  Regardless of how the land came under grazing, the land is commonly burned frequently.

In Latin America the overwhelming majority of the burned area, and of the number of fires each year, is on grazed lands.  Most of the pictures shown in newspapers and shared online are of burning grazing lands.  Sometimes these pictures are clearly in the Amazon area, many times they are in the Pantanal or Chaco regions which correspond roughly with the Rio de la Plata basin.  It does not make sense to separate the two, because they are part of the same huge issue.  In fact, the ecosystem that is generally the most at risk is tropical dry forests.  They have essentially disappeared around the world precisely because they are so susceptible to fire.  Bolivia has one of the very last expanses of natural tropical dry forest, and this is precisely this ‘Chiquitano Dry Forest’ that is at great risk now.

3. The third reason that burns occur is when tropical forests are converted directly to perennial crops (oil palm, cacao, rubber and sugar cane (figures 8 and 9)), and increasingly annual crops (soy beans). The only “good” news here is that the forest is only burned, repeatedly, at the beginning.  However, that land, continually cropped, has very little chance of ever going back into forest, and the carbon in the forest is permanently burned into the atmosphere.  In most ways it is the worst alternative of the various land uses but sometimes the most profitable, as long as the forest replaced has no attributed value.
Figure 8. Part of 4,500 ha recently cleared from primary Amazonian forest to grow sugar cane for a state-owned sugar mill in San Buenaventura, Bolivia.  Google Earth, August 2019
Figure 9.  Clearing land for sugar cane at EASBA (Figure 8), San Buenaventura, Bolivia.  The tall humid forest is dragged down by chains pulled between two bulldozers.  The trees, roots, stumps and topsoil are pushed into large rows (on right) and burned multiple times.  The resulting ash is then spread back over the land. Photo: EASBA.

4. The fourth scenario for burns is when the fire from the above three scenarios gets out of control.  This is a yearly occurrence in the pasture lands and natural grasslands, even inside National Parks.  The grazing land and grazing land edges are where most of the fires occur and, in my opinion, where most smoke, and the densest, is produced.  The fires do not escape every time a LRU burns, but when it does happen it means the conditions are right and usually starts happening all over.  Where wildfires occur, land that has burned becomes more and more prone to burning with each cycle.

An overarching consideration is climate change.  Though there has long been burning inside the Amazon, and on its fraying edges, this varies from year to year depending on the severity of the dry season.  It also appears to vary with the amount of rainfall in the rainy season.  The more it rains in the rainy season the more fuel is produced.  If this is followed by a relatively humid dry season burns are “normal”.  However, if a fairly wet rainy season is followed by a very dry, dry season, it becomes a killer “one-two punch”.  Lots of fuel is produced, followed by conditions conducive to drying, burning and spreading.

We experienced this one-two punch in 2010.  For the first time in memory parts of the tall Bolivian Amazon humid forest caught fire and kept burning.  In our case the neighbor of our neighbor burned a pasture.  The fire jumped into our neighbor’s pasture and in less than 10 minutes it had raced 500 meters and jumped into our tall natural forest.  It took 8 people three days to put the fire out. Historically, the edges of the forest would scorch but the fire would soon run out.  However, if the conditions worsen, Amazonian forests are full of different species of palms that are commonly high in oils and contribute to the fire in different ways.  Some palm trees explode, projecting sparks, while others burn evenly and extendedly, and along with forest litter and termite nests, are very difficult to extinguish.  It is hell.

More extreme rainy and dry periods are exactly what are predicted with climate change in the area.  While conversion of tropical forest to crop and grazing land is contributing to climate change, other factors (namely historical and current use of fossil fuels) around the world driving climate change are having an impact in the tropics.  Increased burning is clearly causing local conditions that added to overall climate change, make the likelihood of burning higher.  This is the frightening feedback loop referred to above.

What should be done about it?

A few years ago there was a climate change conference in Bali (COP 13) and one of its major conclusions was that halting deforestation in the tropics was the most economical way to reduce global gaseous emissions.  When I saw this, I laughed out loud.  I assume that after the conference everybody flew home, got in a car or train and went back to their heated or air-conditioned home.  It brought to mind a meeting that I could hypothetically have with Tacana (indigenous) neighbors who have been practicing carbon-neutral shifting cultivation for generations. They likely have never driven a car, heated or cooled a home or gotten on an airplane.  We could conclude that the most economical way to reduce global gaseous emissions would be for people to stop using cars, airplanes, heaters, air-conditioners and burning diesel to produce grain to fatten cattle.  We would be as right as the Bali Conferees. 

People in temperate areas would say, “But we need cars, airplanes and furnaces to live.”  My neighbors would say, “Well, we need fire to live”.

Conservation benefits everybody, but certain people, like Local Resource Users or people who drive to work, would pay a much higher price to change their practices.  It always seems cheaper if people you don’t know pay the price and you continue living as you always have, doing whatever you think is most convenient and decrying the burning in the Amazon.

I could stop here.  Most people do. Because winters will come to Europe, and people will cool off.  Rains will come to the tropics, crops will grow and cattle will propagate.  Until the next burning season …..

Payment for Environmental Services (PES)
I won’t stop yet because there is a recent generation of efforts to combat climate change, including the Bali conference, that broadly take into account what I have been saying,.  Beginning  with the UN Conference on the Environment and Development (Rio, 1992), there was the broad idea that companies and countries that “pollute” would pay countries and entities that conserve, in what became known as “payments for environmental services” (PES).    In theory, developed countries, the most responsible for the historical buildup of carbon, would pay less-developed countries to use the land in a way that polluted less.  There was to be a global carbon market, where, for example, tropical countries would be paid to not deforest and to not burn.

The Kyoto Protocol (treaty signed 1997 coming into effect 2005) was intended to set this in stone.  The US participated in the development of the protocol, signed it, but refused to ratify it at the level of treaty (which needs approval of Congress).  This was to be a binding agreement, but with the richest and largest producer of greenhouse gasses (at the time) not participating, this idea was stillborn. To my knowledge there has been some carbon trading within European countries, but none of this extended to the tropical countries where the burning keeps occurring.

The Paris Agreement (2016) which is a voluntary framework, would have been a step in the right direction but President Trump, famously, withdrew from this agreement.  For whatever reason very little of this talk at international levels, since 1992, has had any impact on the ground, at least in Bolivia.

It is not just the fault of the US leaders that US people elect. As the Huff Post article suggests, the world economy is complicit.  In Bolivia and Brazil, the contexts I know best, both President Morales and President Bolsonaro are hostile to the idea of PES, and for similar reasons, though their stated philosophy is very different.  Both consider PES to be an imperialist and/or conservationist idea designed to keep countries in the Amazon from developing as they might wish.  In Bolivia there is a very convoluted thought process (led by the Vice President) where Mother Earth is sacred, protected in the Constitution and with her own law declared in 2010[18] and a second law in 2012 declaring Mother Earth Rights[19]. Within this convoluted paradigm it is forbidden to “mercantilise mother nature” (accept payments for conserving natural ecosystems).  In practice Bolivians have been widely encouraged to deforest, burn and plant GMO soya beans for biodiesel or for sale to China[20], but it is forbidden to mercantilise Mother Nature.  In practice you can rape Her, but you can’t accept payments to offset costs associated with being a good mother.

When Morales came to power in 2006 Bolivia had the highest absolute and relative area in the world of certified tropical forest under the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) standards[21]. These were mostly private concessionaires, community-owned or indigenous territory-owned forests (both dry and humid) that had gone through a certification process.  In practice this meant that they could sell certified lumber at higher prices in a reliable market to the US and Europe, it promoted improved regeneration of useful species and improved efficiency of timber use.  Perhaps the most important result was to increase the perceived value of the forest. While the scheme worked, those certified forests were carefully protected because they “were worth a lot” to local beneficiaries. Today, Bolivia has 0 ha (zero hectares) of certified tropical forest.  This idea was discouraged by the Morales government, obstructed and disincentivized once again because it was considered an imperialistic idea and mercantilisation of Mother Earth. 

Relative value of forest and labor
Oh right! Those people on the ground who actually make a decision whether to burn or not!  First as with any people in the world, there is a wide range from rich farmers and ranchers to landless poor …

Most have recognizable aspirations such as having a family, for their children to get an education and to have a better life than their parents.  In my context, for example, there is a small crisis each year when everybody has to buy new school uniforms so that their children can participate in the National Independence Day parade.  Or their grandmother has gotten very sick and the bills have to be paid.  People without formal, regular income, have to seriously consider what they can do that will signify more income.  In the Amazonian context, labor is the most limiting factor.  Poor people cannot afford to hire other people and the most valuable thing that people have is their own labor, with or without access to land. 

In the Amazon, land and forest are considered relatively abundant.  In the case of shifting cultivation, after the second year of cropping it becomes more work to keep weeds out, than it is to clear more land to burn.  It is possible, in theory, to continue to weed with a machete, but the amount of food you can produce is lower, against more and more labor. Therefore, you move to a new area of forest, slash and burn, where your crops are more or less guaranteed. The old field is left to fallow.

In the case of pastures, it is also possible to weed with a machete, but it can easily take 10 man/days per hectare. A 10 ha pasture could therefore take a person almost 3 months of hard labor.  That same pasture can be burned in an hour or two.  If the rancher has a tractor and mower, not very common, that same pasture might represent at least 20 hours of tractor, or it can be burned in an hour or two.  These are huge differences in maintenance costs, in a context where new school uniforms are a major issue.

Over the last 30 years, or more, the main alternative land use that has been proposed is agroforestry.  Unfortunately, the area under agroforestry in Latin America and Africa has not changed much (outside of coffee and cacao based systems), while the human population in the related regions has doubled.  I have further blogs to explore this issue, but I will conclude here by mentioning that I have a 20 year experiment on my farm comparing a highly diverse agroforest (Figure 10), that was never burned, with a high-carbon grazing system (Figure 11) where I leave as many trees as possible, and only burned once for the pasture establishment.

Figure 10. A 19 year-old agroforestry system on my farm near Rurrenabaque, Bolivia.
Figure 11. High-carbon grazing system on my farm near Rurrenabaque, Bolivia.

I set out with high expectations of showing good profitability from agroforestry.  I would love to report that these systems are comparable in terms of their return to labor or return to land, but I cannot.  The income from the cattle system is at least 10 X the income from the agroforestry, each year.  Seen from the point of view a farmer who would have invested their labor, my agroforestry system - on very poor soils - would provide a daily wage of roughly $us1/day.  The high-carbon cattle system, right beside it, would provide at least $us12/day.  I trust that it is clear that in our context $us1/day is far from a suitable income while $us12/day is at the lower end of a living wage.

These figures will vary considerably with quality of soil, experience of the farmer and especially the local market prices.  There is an area of Bolivia, the Alto Beni, where the soils are much better and the cost to market half of mine.  Agroforestry of different kinds is a real alternative here, with relatively little burning and there is almost no cattle grazing.  However it is not representative of the greater Bolivian Amazon, let alone representative of the areas I know in the Amazon regions of Brazil, Peru, Ecuador and Colombia.  In all these areas, tall, natural forest has almost no value, while deforested, grazing land, no matter how degraded, has real value.  The value of the tall forest is measured in relation to its potential for being eventually cleared and turned into grazing land.  It has no value, locally, as the ‘lungs of the world’.

Changing this relationship between the local value of forested land and the local value of deforested land is a responsibility of everybody who wishes to preserve the ‘lungs of the word.’ A commonly stated solution is to stop eating beef.  If enough people did this it might result in a lower price for world beef, but it does not increase the value of tropical forest.  One result of lower beef prices would be that ranchers feel they need to have more pasture to continue to make a living.

Changing the trends of land use in all of the tropics is very far away and will require a concerted effort at the global, national and local levels.  At this point, I believe that ‘preserving the Amazon’ is farther away than we were 10 or 15 years ago due to the leaders we have elected. Many of the initiatives that have been tried could work much better with true political will at the different levels. For the people reading this around the world, the best thing you can do in the short term is work to elect leaders who believe in science, believe that climate change is already happening, believe that it is everybody’s responsibility and are willing to work humbly with other countries.


[2] https://www.eldeber.com.bo/santacruz/El-fuego-gana-la-batalla-a-los-bomberos-y-la-lluvia-los-reivindica-20190826-9577.html?fbclid=IwAR2UJ1ujtcF6Om3NDp7VnuWliNwNTLiXmIdgN6Ejhxzcb0dqNpS-jBtHj0o
[9] https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/images/145464/fires-in-brazil
[10] https://www.paginasiete.bo/sociedad/2019/8/25/en-13-anos-evo-aprobo-cuatro-leyes-que-afectan-bosques-tierras-228660.html?fbclid=IwAR3WUjuY0Z_egui3N0EydkSomDupcAvkZ8q06mGzMtqCwdsBJQeSkZc8OpM
[11] Robison, D.M. 1987. A soil-based assessment of the sustainability of a zero-input alternative to shifting cultivation in Alto Beni, Bolivia.  Ph.D. Thesis, Department of Soil Science, University of  Reading, UK.
[12] https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-34265922
[13] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/sep/19/haze-indonesia-forest-fires-killed-100000-people-harvard-study
[14] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-india-pollution-insight/the-burning-truth-as-farmers-set-fire-to-fields-delhi-braces-for-choking-smog-idUSKCN1MP10F
[16] P. H. Nye and D. J. Greenland.1960  The Soil Under Shifting Cultivations.  156 pp. illus. Tech. Communication 51. Commonwealth Bureau of Soils. Farnham Royal. Bucks. England
[18] http://www.fao.org/fileadmin/user_upload/FAO-countries/Bolivia/docs/Ley_300.pdf
[19] https://bolivia.infoleyes.com/norma/2689/ley-de-derechos-de-la-madre-tierra-071
[20] https://www.paginasiete.bo/sociedad/2019/8/25/en-13-anos-evo-aprobo-cuatro-leyes-que-afectan-bosques-tierras-228660.html?fbclid=IwAR3WUjuY0Z_egui3N0EydkSomDupcAvkZ8q06mGzMtqCwdsBJQeSkZc8OpM
[21] http://gftn.panda.org/?2517/Bolivia-becomes-world-leader-in-FSC-certified-tropical-forest

2 comments:

  1. Daniel, excellent! I learned a lot from and greatly appreciate your clear explanations of the processes in Amazonia. Thanks for this.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Hey Karen. Yes, this has been on mind for a long time.

    ReplyDelete

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