A Slow-Motion Climate Disaster: The Spread of Barren Land. Brazil’s northeast, long a victim of droughts, is now effectively turning into a desert. The cause? Climate change and the landowners who are most affected.
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Brazil’s northeast, long a victim of droughts, is now effectively turning into a desert. The cause? Climate change and the landowners who are most affected. By Jack Nicas
Photographs and Video by Victor MoriyamaDec. 3, 2021, 3:00 a.m. ET
CARNAÚBA DOS DANTAS, Brazil — The land has sustained the Dantas family for more than 150 years, bearing fields of cotton, beanstalks up to a grown man’s hip and, when it rained enough, a river that led to a waterfall.
But on a recent day, with temperatures approaching 100 degrees, the river had run dry, the crops would not grow and the family’s 30 remaining cattle were quickly consuming the last pool of water.
“Fifty years from now, there won’t be a soul living here,” said Inácio Batista Dantas, 80, balanced in a frayed hammock. “I tell my grandchildren that things are going to get very difficult.”
His granddaughter, Hellena, 16, listened in — and pushed back. She grew up here. “I plan to work this land,” she said.
Scientists agree with her grandfather. Much of Brazil’s vast northeast is, in effect, turning into a desert — a process called desertification that is worsening across the planet.
Climate change is one culprit. But local residents, faced with harsh economic realities, have also made short-term decisions to get by — like clearing trees for livestock and extracting clay for the region’s tile industry — that have carried long-term consequences.
Desertification is a natural disaster playing out in slow motion in areas that are home to half a billion people, from northern China and North Africa to remote Russia and the American Southwest.
The process does not generally lead to rolling sand dunes that evoke the Sahara. Instead, higher temperatures and less rain combine with deforestation and overfarming to leave the soil parched, lifeless and nearly devoid of nutrients, unable to support crops or even grass to feed livestock.
That has made it one of the major threats to civilization’s ability to feed itself.
“There is a huge body of evidence that desertification already affects food production and lowers crop yields,” said Alisher Mirzabaev, an agricultural economist at the University of Bonn in Germany, who helped write a 2019 United Nations report on the topic. “And with climate change, it’s going to get even worse.”
Read further from the source
Photographs and Video by Victor MoriyamaDec. 3, 2021, 3:00 a.m. ET
CARNAÚBA DOS DANTAS, Brazil — The land has sustained the Dantas family for more than 150 years, bearing fields of cotton, beanstalks up to a grown man’s hip and, when it rained enough, a river that led to a waterfall.
But on a recent day, with temperatures approaching 100 degrees, the river had run dry, the crops would not grow and the family’s 30 remaining cattle were quickly consuming the last pool of water.
“Fifty years from now, there won’t be a soul living here,” said Inácio Batista Dantas, 80, balanced in a frayed hammock. “I tell my grandchildren that things are going to get very difficult.”
His granddaughter, Hellena, 16, listened in — and pushed back. She grew up here. “I plan to work this land,” she said.
Scientists agree with her grandfather. Much of Brazil’s vast northeast is, in effect, turning into a desert — a process called desertification that is worsening across the planet.
Climate change is one culprit. But local residents, faced with harsh economic realities, have also made short-term decisions to get by — like clearing trees for livestock and extracting clay for the region’s tile industry — that have carried long-term consequences.
Desertification is a natural disaster playing out in slow motion in areas that are home to half a billion people, from northern China and North Africa to remote Russia and the American Southwest.
The process does not generally lead to rolling sand dunes that evoke the Sahara. Instead, higher temperatures and less rain combine with deforestation and overfarming to leave the soil parched, lifeless and nearly devoid of nutrients, unable to support crops or even grass to feed livestock.
That has made it one of the major threats to civilization’s ability to feed itself.
“There is a huge body of evidence that desertification already affects food production and lowers crop yields,” said Alisher Mirzabaev, an agricultural economist at the University of Bonn in Germany, who helped write a 2019 United Nations report on the topic. “And with climate change, it’s going to get even worse.”
Read further from the source
Keywords
drought
desertification
human story
Brazil
agriculture
disasters
deforestation