- Amid an extreme, unprecedented drought, almost all major Amazon rivers have registered their lowest levels in history.
- Experts say the outlook for the next months is even worse, putting researchers on alert for the possibility of Amazon’s worst drought ever.
- The low river level in Manaus, Amazonas’ state capital, may increase prices of products shipped through the city’s harbor.
- The drought has isolated some Indigenous communities, while others have to walk long distances through dry riverbeds carrying groceries and equipment.
The world’s attention has turned to the Amazon as the biome’s major rivers have reached their lowest level. Unprecedented drought has turned once-mighty riverbeds into large sandbanks, creating an apocalyptic landscape with harsh impacts on local communities.
In Brazil, the most critical situation happens in the Madeira River, which crosses Amazonas and Rondônia states. According to official data, it hit 79 centimeters (31 inches) on Sep. 9 in the city of Porto Velho, 33 cm (13 in) below the lowest level ever registered, in October 2023.
Other major rivers, like the Negro, the Solimões and the Purus, also have broken their September records when comparing their levels with the same period in the last decades. The sinuous Purus river, for example, which is born in Peru and crosses Acre and Amazonas states, measured 7.5 meters (24.6 feet) on Sept. 9 in the Amazonas city of Beruri, 2.2 m (7.2 ft lower than the previous record, registered on the same day in 1983.
“From the data we have at the moment and what is expected in terms of rainfall, we can say that this could be the most serious drought the Amazon has ever experienced,” Adriana Cuartas, a hydrology researcher at the National Center for Monitoring and Warning Natural Disasters, CEMADEN, told Mongabay.
All these rivers flow into the Amazonas, which measured 4.7 m (15.5 ft) in the municipality of Itacoatiara on Sep. 9. It’s 3.3 m (11 ft) lower than the previous record, registered in September 2017.
And the prospect for the next few days is far from good. “I would say that more records will be broken,” Ana Paula Cunha, a drought researcher also from CEMADEN, told Mongabay. “The next round of rain is expected to be delayed, so you can expect more rain only in November or even later. September is still going to be a very chaotic month; October too.”
The worsening outlook prompted Manaus harbor to initiate an emergency plan, with the construction of giant ferries to carry products through the stretches of the river where larger ships no longer cross. Despite the efforts, Manaus’ population may face an increase in food items imported from the rest of Brazil. At the same time, electronics produced in Manaus’ Franc Zone may become more expensive for consumers from the country’s south and southwest.
The situation also woke researchers to the possibility of a new die-off of Amazon river dolphins — in 2023, 209 animals died in Tefé Lake, in Amazonas state, amid a sharp increase in the water temperature.
The drought started in 2023 when El Niño — the abnormal warming of the surface waters of the equatorial Pacific Ocean — reduced rainfall over the Amazon region. A new oceanic anomaly started to operate in 2024, resulting in a shorter and milder rainy season and worsening the situation of the already impaired Amazon rivers.
“The conditions of last year’s drought have not been recovered in this rainy season, and we are still dealing with the event of the warming of the North Atlantic waters, which favors the scarcity of rain in this region,” said Flávio Altieri, science and technology analyst at CENSIPAM, a research center that supports other federal bodies operating in the Amazon.
According to the experts, global warming is clearly interfering with the oscillations of the oceans’ temperatures. But local factors, like deforestation, also play a role. With fewer trees, there is less evapotranspiration, and less water is thrown into the atmosphere.
Scientists from the Brazilian space agency, INPE, have already shown the relationship between rain and deforestation. In some parts of the Amazon, they found that the clearance of 37% of an area was followed by a 34% decrease in water precipitation.
“Deforestation contributes to a lack of rainfall and rising temperatures not only in that region, but also in neighboring regions,” said CEMADEN’s Cunha, referring to the “flying rivers” — winds that move rainforest moisture to other parts of Brazil.
Now, winds are carrying the smoke from the burning forest, as the Amazon is experiencing its worst fire season in the past 19 years. A thick layer of soot covers nearly 60% of Brazil and threatens to reach Argentina and Uruguay. On Sep. 9, the city of São Paulo registered the worst air quality among the world’s largest metropolises.
“We’re seeing an anticipation of the fire season, at the same time that fires in 2023 extended a lot, until almost April 2024,” Ane Alencar, director of science at IPAM, told Mongabay. “Clearly, the climate played a fundamental role in extending the burning period.”
Historically, ranchers and land-grabbers used fire at the last stage of the deforestation process, to burn the tangle of branches and trunks left on the ground. With the drier weather and the continuous degradation of the forest, however, environmental criminals realized they could use fire to destroy the forest right away. Besides saving lots of money in chainsaws, tractors, fuel and personnel, it makes it much more difficult for environmental agents to act on the ongoing deforestation through satellite imagery.
“This means that the forest, due to climate change, has lost moisture, and now they are making this perverse alliance,” the environment minister, Marina Silva, said to the Brazilian broadcaster Globo. “They set it on fire, then cut it down and try to appropriate these areas through land regularization processes.”
Several fire outbreaks are criminal, according to authorities, and Brazil launched inquiries to investigate them. Criminal fires are also occurring in the Pantanal wetlands, the Cerrado savanna and Brazil’s most populated state, São Paulo. By mid-September, the Federal Police had already opened more than 50 investigations into criminal fires all over Brazil.
Communities are isolated
The historic reduction in river levels has left communities completely isolated in parts of the Amazon, where boats are the only means of transportation. Others have to walk several kilometers on the sand to reach nearby city centers to sell their products, such as cassava or bananas, and buy groceries and medicines.
“This is the worst drought I have ever seen,” Anderson Barroso Ortega, president of the Witoto of Alto Solimões Association, told Mongabay in a phone interview. He represents the Indigenous Witoto communities in the upper Solimões River, in the Amazonas municipality of Amaturá, in one of the regions most affected by the drought.
Two of the communities, usually settled on the shores of the river, are now surrounded by islands and dunes. To get in and out of the communities, residents must walk for 30 minutes under the sun, carrying groceries, fuel and the heavy boat machine.
“It used to be that our elders knew ‘this month will be a month of drought, that month will be a month of flood,'” Ortega said. “Not today. The climate is all messed up.”
Indigenous communities are also suffering in other parts of the Amazon. In Pará state, Munduruku Indigenous people are being forced to drink water contaminated by the mercury used by illegal gold miners, as smaller and cleaner rivers are drying up.
The climate chaos is not limited to the Amazon. Brazil as a whole faces the most severe drought of its history, both in intensity and in the size of the affected areas. The phenomenon hits two-thirds of the country — an area equivalent to the size of India — with some cities counting more than 150 days without a single drop of rain.
The dry spell is already affecting Brazilian’s pockets and health. Hydropower plants are being shut down due to the low river levels, and the more expensive thermoelectric plants have started up, prompting the federal administration to increase electricity bills. At the same time, people with respiratory problems suffer from low air humidity, which in some areas has reached levels lower than in the Sahara desert.
Earlier this year, in May, the far south of Brazil faced an opposite tragedy when an unprecedented flood killed more than 180 people. According to CEMADEN’S Cunha, it seemed an anticipation of the “new normal” under climate change.
“When we look at the climate change scenarios for the middle of the century, this is what we see. Drought in the Amazon, the midwest and the northeast of Brazil, and above-average rainfall in the South of the country,” she said.
Banner image: Major Amazon rivers have reached the lowest levels in their histories, with severe impacts on local communities. Image courtesy of Juliana Pesqueira/Amazônia Real(CC BY-NC-SA 4.0).
Drought forces Amazon Indigenous communities to drink mercury-tainted water
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