By Bob Carnevale

In Brazil today, rivers are vanishing. Fires consume the wetlands. Smoke blankets cities. What’s unfolding is not just a natural disaster – it’s a warning. The Amazon, one of the world’s most vital ecosystems, is approaching a tipping point. And if it falls, so might the global climate system that supports us all.

A Nation on Fire

In 2024, Brazil’s Center for Natural Disaster Monitoring reported the country is experiencing its worst drought on record, with over 1,400 cities affected. Fires rage across the Pantanal, the world’s largest tropical wetland. In São Paulo, the air is thick with smoke. In the heart of the Amazon, rivers like the Rio Madeira have dried to a trickle, leaving once-thriving communities stranded and searching for water.

But this isn’t just bad weather. Scientists agree: climate change and deforestation are fueling this disaster.

The Breakdown of the Flying Rivers

One of the Amazon’s most astonishing features is its “flying rivers” – atmospheric currents of moisture that cycle water from the Atlantic Ocean through the forest, feeding rain across much of South America. This delicate water system depends on the trees. As they’re cut down, the system unravels. Less moisture. Less rain. More drought. More fire.

The damage isn’t confined to the Amazon. These flying rivers hydrate entire countries – including Paraguay, Uruguay, and Argentina. Without them, agriculture fails. Hydroelectric power weakens. Cities dry out. As deforestation accelerates, so does the breakdown of this vital system. From Frontier Dream to Ecological Nightmare

To understand this crisis, we have to understand history. In the 1970s, the Brazilian government encouraged settlers to colonize the “empty” Amazon. People seeking land, freedom, and opportunity moved in – building roads, clearing forest, and establishing cattle ranches and soy farms.

Today, those settlers – and their descendants – live on the edge of a vanishing forest. Many, like Antonio Bertola of Realidade, came chasing dreams. What they found was a cycle of hardship, environmental degradation, and, ultimately, loss.

Once infrastructure arrives – roads, electricity, slaughterhouses – the forest disappears fast. One area in Rondônia, a state on the Amazon’s southern edge, has lost an area of rainforest larger than Texas. The Amazon is being swallowed, acre by acre, by legal and illegal development.

A Tipping Point No One Wants Scientists now believe that losing 20–25% of the Amazon could trigger an irreversible transformation: the rainforest becomes savanna. As of today, we’ve already lost nearly 20%. We are right on the edge.

This matters far beyond Brazil. The Amazon stores up to 120 billion metric tons of carbon – nearly 12 years of global emissions. If that carbon is released into the atmosphere, the Paris climate goals become meaningless. Global temperatures would soar, weather systems would collapse, and tipping points around the world – melting ice sheets, thawing permafrost – could cascade.

In short: if the Amazon falls, the climate may go with it.

The Human and Wild Cost

Over 47 million people call the Amazon home, including 2.2 million Indigenous people who have protected these lands for generations. They are being displaced, infected, and in some cases, assassinated for defending their territories.

At the same time, wildlife is dying. Brazil has already seen mass dolphin deaths due to extreme heat and drought. The Amazon holds over 10% of Earth’s known species. Once gone, they won’t come back. This isn’t theory – it’s happening right now.

Who’s Profiting?

Much of the deforestation is driven by cattle and soy. Brazil is the largest exporter of beef in the world. Companies like JBS, Bunge, and Cargill have been fined repeatedly for buying from embargoed lands.

Laws requiring farmers to preserve 80% of forest on their land are often ignored. Fines go unpaid. Middlemen make it easy to sell illegally raised cattle and crops. Powerful political forces – including past administrations – have cut environmental protections and gutted enforcement agencies.

In 2019, Bolsonaro’s administration fired environmental officials, slashed IBAMA’s budget, and pushed plans to pave roads deep into preserved jungle, like the controversial BR-319, which could accelerate deforestation by 277% by 2050.

The Global Moment Is Now This October, world leaders will gather in Cali, Colombia for the UN Biodiversity Conference (COP16). They’ve promised to stop biodiversity loss and restore nature by 2030. But promises without action mean nothing. According to the WWF’s Living Planet Report, wildlife populations worldwide have declined by 73% since 1970. If we don’t drastically shift how we fund, farm, consume, and govern, we are not just losing forests. We’re losing our future.

To change course, we must transform how we eat, farm, and fuel our economies.

What You Can Do You don’t need to be in the Amazon to make a difference. At the Climate Placement Project, we help people find their role – whether that’s pursuing a climate career, supporting Indigenous justice, funding frontline action, or using your voice to shift policy.

The Amazon may still have a future. But only if we make a choice – today.

If you’ve been waiting for the moment to step in, this is it.

Join the movement. Find your place. Help protect the Amazon before it’s too late.