By Carlos Nobre, senior climate scientist at the University of São Paulo in Brazil and a member of the Brazilian Academy of Sciences.
Excerpted from an article originally appearing in Scientific American on October 1^st, 2019.

The Amazon is burning. Physically, the world has seen more deforestation and fires in Brazil’s portion of the Amazon this year than at any other point in nearly a decade. But figuratively, a conflagration over economic development in the region blazes even more fiercely.

Left unchecked for the next 20 to 40 years, the destructive forces that are eating away at the world’s greatest rain forest could put the Amazon on course to become a degraded savanna. The effects will ripple through the global climate.

This threat has been seen everywhere. Five years after dozens of governments and companies endorsed the New York Declaration on Forests at the 2014 United Nations Climate Summit, the annual rate of tree cover loss around the world has increased by 43 percent. Much of the conflict over the Amazon and the other great forests hinges on the false impression that we must choose between protecting the forests and developing them for economic benefit.

But this thinking fails to acknowledge that their largest economic potential lies not in replacing them with agriculture, mining and timber but in harnessing their superb biological assets. Forests can be much more profitable when left intact than when destroyed to make way for cattle or soybean farms. And this finding is based on profits gained from only one product: the acai berry.

They have long led the way in conserving the region, and their forests have lower rates of deforestation, lower carbon emissions, higher carbon storage and greater concentrations of biodiversity.

The knowledge of forest peoples—passed down orally from generation to generation—reveals valuable information on how plants and animals can benefit human health. Indigenous women in particular often see themselves as “guardians of seeds,” creating a vast socio-biodiversity and conserving genetically diverse seeds and plants that can help protect valuable crops against drought and emerging pathogens.

Read the full piece on Scientific American's website.