Dr. CARLOS NOBRE on the Shifting Future of the Amazon /106
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What are the limitations of the body you occupy? At what point do you begin to break down physically, emotionally, and psychologically? The Amazon Rainforest, like any other living body, can only handle so much…
Dr. Carlos Nobre has dedicated many years in the pursuit of understanding the Amazon Rainforest’s tipping point in relation to the negative synergies of climate change, deforestation, drought, and rampant fire abuse. We cannot feign ignorance about the crossroads our planetary community is just finally willing to recognize. We know that an increase of just a few degrees Celsius, or mass deforestation above forty percent in Amazonia, will lead to this aforementioned tipping point. We also know that in the last sixty years, the region has already warmed by one degree Celsius and deforestation has reached twenty percent in the Amazon. What does it mean that we could very well be responsible for the savannization of an entire rainforest, the radical dismembering of the Amazon’s body?
Dr. Carlos Nobre is currently Science Director of the Research Project “National Institute of Science and Technology for Climate Change”, chair of the Brazilian Panel on Climate Change, and the creator of Brazil’s National Center for Monitoring and Alerts of Natural Disasters. Dr. Nobre chaired the Large Scale Biosphere-Atmosphere Experiment in Amazonia, an international research initiative designed to create the new knowledge needed to understand the climatic, ecological, biogeochemical, and hydrological functioning of Amazonia, the impact of land use and climate changes on these functions, and the interactions between Amazonia and the Earth system. He has also been a member of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and was a member of the UN Secretary-General Scientific Advisory Board for Global Sustainability. As a climate and earth systems scientist, his work focuses on the Amazon and its impacts on the Earth system, climate modeling, and global environmental change.
During a time in which environmental crisis has become synonymous with climate change, Dr. Nobre clarifies the complexities surrounding the driving factors of deforestation and savannization. Additionally, Ayana and Dr. Nobre discuss the margins of safety that must be implemented, the simultaneous rise of nationalism and the ramifications of climate change, and the possibility of a third way outside the realms of the preservation/consumption binary when it comes to Amazonia.
♫ Music is “Transient” by Les Halles and ”Like a River” by Kate Wolf.
For The Wild Podcast is an anthology of the Anthropocene; focused on land-based protection, co-liberation and intersectional storytelling rooted in a paradigm shift away from human supremacy, endless growth and consumerism.