Tha Amazon

Brazil plans 23 new dams for heart of Amazon rainforest – ‘Wreaking an incalculable human and environmental toll in the Amazon’

Desdemona Despair,

27 September, 2012

RIO DE JANEIRO, BRAZIL – The Brazilian government is planning to build at least 23 new hydroelectric dams in the country’s Amazon region, of which seven are set to be installed in the heart of the region, in previously untouched areas of one of the most biodiverse ecosystems in the world, O Globo newspaper reports. After the long-running dispute over the Belo Monte dam, environment activists have expressed incredulity at the plans.

Along with the six hydroelectric power stations already under construction, the government hopes these new dams will generate over 38,000 megawatts of power – half the nearly 78,900 megawatts currently generated by 201 operational power stations across Brazil.

Two plants are already in operation in the region: the Estreito plant on the Tocantins River, and the Santo Antônio plant on the Madeira River, the Amazon’s biggest tributary.

Funding for half the projects – around R$78 billion (US$38.5 billion) – is expected to come from the government’s Growth Acceleration Program or PAC (Programa de Aceleração do Crescimento). Together, the existing and planned sites would increase Brazil’s energy capacity by 54 percent.

Yet opponents are concerned that seven of the new plants will be built in extremely sensitive parts of the Amazon, including a string of seven dams planned for the Aripuanã and Roosevelt Rivers that would directly affect land officially deemed to require “extremely high conservation protection.”

The work would also come into contact with indigenous peoples’ land. If constructed, the reservoirs for the two largest new plants on the basin would flood an area of land the size of São Paulo city.

“We are planning with the greatest care and seeking to minimalize the impact [the building of the dams might cause],” reassured Energy Development Secretary Altino Ventura, who said the Amazon basin should account for around half of new energy sources by 2020. […]

The news comes as environmental campaigners, who had been celebrating that work on the controversial Belo Monte dam had been halted, were dealt a setback after builders were given the green light to restart.

Biologists have said that Brazil should be looking for alternatives now, rather than later regretting losses to the Amazon’s unique ecosystems. Christian Poirier, Brazil Campaigner at Amazon Watch, had stronger words over the government’s plans:

“The Brazilian government’s reckless quest to dam the Amazon’s wild rivers has demonstrated a disquieting level of authoritarianism, quashing human rights while stripping any semblance of environmental sustainability,” he said in an interview with The Rio Times.

“The Brazilian government’s overdependence on hydroelectric power is wreaking an incalculable human and environmental toll in the Amazon,” he concluded. […]


This article is from early last year.  I do not know if the Amazon is still in drought.

Amazon drought threatens to speed warming

SCIENTISTS fear billions of tree deaths in the Amazon caused by drought could turn the forest from a carbon sink to a carbon source.

SMH,

5 February, 2011

Billions of trees died in the record drought that struck the basin last year, raising fears the vast forest is on the verge of a tipping point, where it will stop absorbing greenhouse gas emissions and instead increase them.

The Amazon rainforest soaks up more than a quarter of the world's atmospheric carbon, making it a critically important buffer against global warming.

A switch from a carbon sink to a carbon source could prompt further droughts and mass tree deaths, creating a feedback loop that may cause runaway climate change.

''Put starkly, current emissions pathways risk playing Russian roulette with the world's largest forest,'' said Simon Lewis, a tropical forest researcher at the University of Leeds, England, who led the research, published in the journal Science.

Dr Lewis was careful to note that scientific uncertainty remained and that the 2005 drought - thought then to be of once-a-century severity - and the 2010 drought might yet be explained by natural climate variation.

''We can't just wait and see because there is no going back,'' he said. ''We won't know we have passed the point where the Amazon turns from a sink to a source until afterwards, when it will be too late.''

Alex Bowen, of the Grantham research institute on climate change at the London School of Economics, said huge emissions of carbon from the Amazon would make it even harder to limit global greenhouse gases enough to avoid dangerous climate change. ''It therefore makes it even more important for there to be strong and urgent reductions in man-made emissions,'' Dr Bowen said.

The revelation of mass tree deaths in the Amazon is a blow to efforts to reduce the destruction of the world's forests, one of the biggest sources of global carbon emissions.

The recent use of satellite imagery by Brazilian authorities has drastically cut deforestation rates. Replanting in Asia had slowed the net loss.