Amazon Fires - Everything you need to know about it

Amazon RainForest on Fire (Night View).

The Amazon rainforest is burning — news that prompted shock and fear across the world as Brazil’s space research agency reported this week that a record number of fires have broken out in the forest this year.

Online, hashtags urged people to pray for the Amazon and to spread awareness of the fires. By Thursday, French president Emmanuel Macron had called discussions of the “international crisis” to be at the top of the agenda at the upcoming G7 Summit in France.

In Brazil, the country that is home to the majority of the rainforest, president Jail Bolsonaro campaigned on a platform of opening up access to the country’s protected lands for commercial use, and has — controversially — followed through during his time in office. Efforts to fight for the forest’s preservation can have bloody consequences; one 2018 report found that the country was the deadliest in the world for environmental conservationists.

July 2019 was the hottest month ever recorded on Earth, amid a trend of skyrocketing temperatures and heatwaves across the globe that are directly linked to climate change. The Arctic has seen a surge in wildfires, including in Alaska, Greenland and Siberia.

In the Amazon itself, deforestation has continued, leading to enormous risks for the animal species living there. Scientists in 2012 found that deforestation over 30 years in parts of the Amazon has been destructive enough to ensure regional extinction for 38 species, including 10 mammal species, 20 bird species and eight amphibian species. “Realistic deforestation scenarios suggest that local regions will lose an average of nine vertebrate species and have a further 16 committed to extinction by 2050,” researchers wrote in the 2012 study, published in Science.

Brazilian climate scientist Carlos Nobre said, “We have to quickly set up a policy of zero deforestation.”

Should the world pay Brazil a tax to maintain the amazon as a forest?

The Amazon provides 20% of the worlds oxygen according to CNN. It also harbors one of the most extensive collections of genetic diversity on the planet, as well as provides habitat to indigenous peoples.

Being as the oxygen and carbon-fixing benefits of the Amazon benefit the entire world to some degree or the other, the Amazon is a public good. However, to keep it as a rain forest means that Brazil must not capitalize on the land or the other resources in the land in ways that cause deforestation. If we are considering the Amazon as a world-ecosystem service provider, should we pay Brazil for this service?