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O céu se abre no momento em que nosso caminhão deixa o último trecho de estrada pavimentada. A Diretora do Programa de Água, Dra. Marcia Macedo, aperta os olhos para manter o foco no que consegue ver entre uma limpeza e outra do para-brisa. Em poucos minutos, nosso caminho se transformou de uma estrada de terra em um leito de rio de lama laranja brilhante, sulcado pela passagem de caminhões pesados que transportam soja das fazendas vizinhas.

Macedo desvia para evitar solavancos e depressões, mas logo há mais deles do que estrada plana. Nós nos preparamos para as poças, olhando pelas janelas salpicadas de spray laranja.

É uma manhã de segunda-feira, na estação chuvosa, nos arredores da Amazônia, e estamos indo para o trabalho.

A Estação de Campo de Tanguro fica a cerca de uma hora de carro de Canarana, a cidade mais próxima, localizada em uma região do Brasil às vezes chamada de arco do desmatamento. Há várias décadas, a agricultura começou a surgir na região sul da floresta amazônica, criando áreas retangulares de terras agrícolas na floresta primária. Na maior parte do trajeto, somos ladeados apenas por megacampos de soja ou pastos de gado.

Macedo, que realiza pesquisas na Tanguro desde 2007, lembra-se de uma época em que a viagem poderia ter sido marcada pela travessia do limiar das savanas florestais do Cerrado – Brasil – para a Amazônia. Agora, o desmatamento próximo à estrada obscureceu essa transição natural. Eventualmente, no entanto, tufos verdes exuberantes emergem da chuva e percebemos que estamos quase lá.

Desde a sua fundação em 2004, a Tanguro tem oferecido a pesquisadores de todo o mundo a oportunidade de investigar grandes questões sobre como as mudanças climáticas e o desmatamento estão afetando a Amazônia. Macedo e sua equipe vieram para estudar os córregos e reservatórios da Tanguro.

Paramos do lado de fora da estação de pesquisa, tirando as malas, embrulhadas em sacos plásticos de lixo, da caçamba da caminhonete. A assistente de pesquisa, Zoe Dietrich, segura vários componentes eletrônicos vitais no peito, levando-os para uma varanda coberta para protegê-los da chuva. A pós-doutoranda Dra. Aibra Atwood começa a retirar tubos de núcleo de sedimentos de uma pilha de equipamentos. As nuvens se dissipam e o dia de trabalho na Tanguro começa.

A Fundação

A decisão de se estabelecer na fazenda Tanguro causou polêmica na época.“Quase nos separou”, lembra o fundador da Tanguro, Dr. Daniel Nepstad. “Tivemos uma discussão que durou dois dias.”

Quatorze anos antes, Nepstad havia estabelecido o programa amazônico no Woodwell Climate (então Woods Hole Research Center) no estado do Pará, estudando a resiliência das florestas amazônicas durante as longas estações secas. Esse trabalho deu origem a um novo instituto de pesquisa com sede no Brasil – em 1995, Nepstad cofundou o Instituto de Pesquisa Ambiental da Amazônia (IPAM) em Belém para buscar ciência relevante para políticas que pudessem informar o desenvolvimento sustentável na Amazônia. A Woodwell Climate e o IPAM começaram a realizar experimentos de simulação de secas e descobriram que a floresta tropical, que há muito tempo era considerada imune ao fogo, perdia essa resistência durante secas severas. Para investigar as implicações disso, Nepstad percebeu que eles precisavam de um novo experimento em algum lugar na borda da Amazônia, onde é mais seco o ano todo.

Nepstad vinha passando cada vez mais tempo no estado do Mato Grosso, interessado pela expansão do cultivo de soja na Amazônia. Durante sua busca por um novo local de estudo, o Grupo Amaggi fez um convite extraordinário.

O Grupo Amaggi era, na época, o maior produtor de soja do mundo, e a soja estava rapidamente se tornando o inimigo ambiental número um, à medida que centenas de milhares de acres de florestas eram derrubados para expandir seu cultivo.

“Mas o Grupo Amaggi, uma empresa brasileira, queria se antecipar à questão”, diz Nepstad. A perspectiva de perder um mercado importante na Europa levantou questões sobre o melhor caminho a seguir. Em 2002, eles criaram o primeiro sistema para rastrear as práticas florestais dos agricultores que lhes vendiam soja. Em 2004, eles fizeram um convite a Nepstad para pesquisar as florestas em sua recém-adquirida propriedade Tanguro, um conjunto de fazendas de gado desmatadas que estavam em processo de conversão para campos de soja.

A esperança era que a pesquisa demonstrasse ao mundo o que realmente estava acontecendo nessas enormes fazendas de soja na Amazônia, fornecendo dados que poderiam contribuir para conversas sobre soja sustentável.

“Há vinte anos, havia muitas discussões sobre preservação ambiental e agricultura”, diz a Diretora de ESG, Comunicações e Conformidade do Grupo Amaggi, Juliana de Lavor Lopes. “Esses dois podem criar uma simbiose? Acho que sabíamos que [eles] poderiam trabalhar juntos, mas será que poderíamos provar isso?”

Para Nepstad, o convite também foi a oportunidade perfeita para realizar um experimento de fogo controlado em um local ideal. Após muitos debates, o IPAM decidiu aceitar.

“Muitas pessoas temiam que isso arruinasse nossa reputação, minasse nossa credibilidade junto às organizações de base – muitas ONGs achavam que estávamos nos vendendo”, diz Nepstad. “Algumas pessoas nos acusaram de termos sido comprados pelo Grupo Amaggi.”

Mas Nepstad foi muito claro quanto aos termos da parceria. Eles não aceitariam nenhum dinheiro da empresa além do que o Grupo Amaggi investiu nos prédios do campus da estação de pesquisa. E eles só apoiariam as atividades da fazenda na medida em que a ciência permitisse. A pesquisa relataria com precisão os impactos da agricultura sobre a floresta, sem restrições de publicação

Assim, em 2004, com poucos recursos financeiros, mas acompanhados por uma equipe dedicada de técnicos de campo e pesquisadores dos experimentos de seca no Pará, – alguns dos quais ainda trabalham na estação de campo atualmente – Woodwell e IPAM montaram um acampamento na Tanguro.

A vida na estação

As botas sujas de lama começam a fazer fila do lado de fora da porta do refeitório às 11h50. Donna Lucia serve o almoço pontualmente ao meio-dia.

Maria Lúcia Pinheiro Nascimento administra a cozinha da Tanguro há mais de 16 anos, preparando refeições fartas para cientistas e técnicos de campo famintos três vezes ao dia. O almoço e o jantar geralmente envolvem alguma carne grelhada ou cozida lentamente, arroz, feijão e uma salada fresca ou legumes assados. Hoje tem abóbora, abobrinha e sobras de linguiça e peito do churrasco de ontem à noite. O café da manhã é mais leve – pão de queijo, ovos, pão fresco, frutas e café – preparado e devorado antes do início do trabalho às 7h.

Muitos dos técnicos que vivem e trabalham aqui cinco dias por semana dizem que a Tanguro é como uma segunda casa, e seus colegas, uma segunda família. Para Dona Lúcia, como é chamada pelos funcionários e visitantes, cozinhar para a estação de pesquisa não é como cozinhar para a família. É realmente cozinhar para a família. Seu marido, Sebastião Nascimento, o “Seu Bate”, foi um dos primeiros técnicos de campo a trabalhar no experimento de seca no Pará. Ele voou para se juntar à equipe da Tanguro um ano após a fundação da empresa e trouxe sua família um ano depois, incluindo seu filho, Ebis Pinheiro de Nascimento, que também entrou como técnico de campo. Um terceiro técnico do Pará, Raimundo Mota Quintino, conhecido como “Santarém”, juntou-se à família quando se casou com a filha de Dona Lúcia.

“Estou com minha família”, diz ela. “Isso me traz alegria.”

Com ou sem parentesco, a equipe da Tanguro trabalha em conjunto, como uma família. A cooperação e o respeito são essenciais em um lugar tão remoto e desconectado (o wifi só se estende a cerca de 18 metros do prédio da cantina) como a Tanguro.

“Brincamos que é como se fosse o ‘Big Brother’”, diz o gerente de campo Darlisson Nunes da Costa. “Mas estamos realmente unidos e nos respeitamos mutuamente. É um ambiente maravilhoso para se trabalhar”.

Também pode ser um ambiente fisicamente desafiador, com longos dias de calor e umidade, preocupações com a segurança em uma floresta cheia de cobras e onças, porcos selvagens territoriais e terrenos que podem facilmente causar uma torção no tornozelo. Ao mesmo tempo, garantindo que os cientistas obtenham os dados de que precisam.

Todo técnico de campo precisa ser adaptável e versátil, pois, além dos horários das refeições, não há rotina diária. Sua manhã pode envolver o corte de videiras para encontrar um caminho para um riacho escondido, selecionado a partir de imagens de satélite como um local de amostragem. A tarde pode ser dedicada à solução de problemas em uma das torres de monitoramento de carbono.

“Não podemos dizer que temos um trabalho monótono”, diz Seu Bate. “Fazemos de tudo um pouco.”

Mesmo assim, cada um dos técnicos desenvolveu suas especialidades ao longo das décadas. Santarém ainda usa as habilidades de aquaviário de seu trabalho anterior como guia de pesca na cidade portuária do Pará que lhe deu o apelido. Ele leva a canoa para os reservatórios com frequência, ajudando os pesquisadores a extraírem núcleos de sedimentos. Seu Bate pode construir o que você precisar – seja a base de alumínio para uma câmara flutuante de monitoramento de metano ou um colar personalizado para segurar tubos de núcleo de solo pesados enquanto você coleta amostras, basta dar a ele 20 minutos e algumas ferramentas elétricas. Nunes da Costa mantém as atividades de campo da equipe organizadas a cada semana e consegue, sem esforço, abrir um caminho claro na floresta. O Ebis gosta de coletar dados, especialmente quando isso envolve a coleta de amostras de água ou de peixes nos cursos d’água de Tanguro. Para o coordenador de projetos científicos da estação, Dr. Leonardo Maracahipes-Santos, escalar a torre de carbono de 35 metros é como caminhar.

As pessoas que visitam a Tanguro variam. Às vezes, as semanas passam com apenas os técnicos de campo na residência e, às vezes, as pequenas casas em estilo de cabine e a alegre cantina da estação estão repletas de hóspedes.

Esta primavera já foi bastante movimentada. Maracahipes-Santos cuida das atividades diárias e organiza a equipe rotativa de visitantes. Em poucas semanas, ele passou de acompanhar

uma equipe de jornalistas brasileiros pelos locais de estudo, a trabalhar com colaboradores do Instituto Max Planck na manutenção de rotina das torres de carbono e a coordenar conversas entre pesquisadores visitantes e representantes do Grupo Amaggi sobre a remoção de várias barragens na propriedade.

E mesmo durante as semanas mais calmas, ainda há muita ciência a ser feita – coleta de amostras para estudos em andamento, execução de análises de dados, verificação de equipamentos. É difícil conseguir um dia de folga na Tanguro, mas pelo menos nunca é entediante.

“É muito interessante, porque fazemos parte de um projeto grandioso, que é montar experimentos em campo junto com os cientistas”, diz Nunes da Costa. “Nós nos sentimos um pouco como cientistas porque todo esse negócio começa no chão. Podemos começar com um pedaço de madeira colocado no chão e chegar até um artigo científico. Tenho muito orgulho. Não apenas de mim, mas de toda a equipe.”

Por sua vez, Dona Lucia se orgulha de alimentar a ciência na Tanguro.

“Tenho muito orgulho de estar em uma empresa como esta, hoje”, diz Dona Lúcia. “Hoje em dia, para trabalhar em uma empresa como essa, é preciso ter um diploma, e eu não tenho. Não tenho diploma de gastronomia. Não tenho nenhum diploma. Mas aprendo todos os dias”.

Um laboratório natural

O trabalho de campo termina às 16h, deixando Macedo, Atwood, Nunez da Costa e eu suados e exaustos após passar uma tarde vagando por áreas úmidas acidentadas em busca de leitos de riachos. A Atwood estava colocando medidores de temperatura a cada 500 metros acima e abaixo dos reservatórios. Ela está interessada nos impactos que esses pequenos corpos d’água têm sobre a bacia hidrográfica e até onde esses impactos se estendem. No entanto, os riachos amazônicos muitas vezes passam por segmentos intransponíveis de pântano, de modo que encontrar os locais de amostragem exige uma caminhada vigorosa e um bom facão.

Após a caminhada, encontramos o grupo de jornalistas visitantes no reservatório de Darro. Um dos maiores reservatórios de Tanguro, o Darro fornece água para a estação de pesquisa para chuveiros e limpeza. Em dias especialmente quentes, também é um ótimo local para nadar.

A água é quente – mais quente do que os riachos próximos, os dados de temperatura de Atwood confirmaram – mas ainda assim mais fria do que o ar abafado. Também é transparente. Nossos pés podem ser vistos pisando na faixa de água mais fria lá embaixo. Reflexos brancos e ondulantes se formam na superfície, um espelho perfeito das nuvens acima.

Na Amazônia, a água é tudo. É isso que torna possível a existência de florestas exuberantes. É o que liga uma fazenda de soja no Mato Grosso a estuários na foz do rio Amazonas. E é isso que conecta essa região ao clima global. As nuvens que se aglomeram acima de Darro ficam mais pesadas e mais escuras com a chuva enquanto nadamos. Embora parte dessa chuva caia de volta à Terra aqui, outra parte é empurrada para fora dos trópicos para cair em outros lugares.

“A água faz duas coisas”, diz o diretor do programa Woodwell Tropics, Dr. Mike Coe. “Primeiro: a chuva está caindo em outro lugar. Segundo: água é energia. É preciso uma enorme quantidade de energia para evaporar a água e essa energia é liberada em outro lugar quando chove. Assim, a energia do sol que cai aqui é transportada para todo o mundo. Isso é muito importante. Isso define o clima”.

Isso significa que, por meio da água, as mudanças aqui têm o potencial de causar grandes mudanças em todo o mundo. A localização da Tanguro em uma região da Amazônia que sofreu intenso desmatamento para a agricultura há apenas algumas décadas torna-a um local ideal para estudar essa causa e efeito.

“Quando você remove as florestas da paisagem, você muda algumas coisas fundamentalmente que não podem ser desfeitas”, diz Macedo. “Você altera a quantidade de água nos córregos, altera a profundidade de enraizamento das plantas na paisagem, altera todo o ciclo hidrológico.”

A Tanguro é bastante representativa das mudanças ocorridas em toda a região. É um mosaico de florestas naturais, campos de soja e algodão e alguns bosques de eucaliptos plantados. Algumas de suas bacias hidrográficas estão completamente dentro dos limites da floresta, outras passam completamente por terras agrícolas. Alguns riachos têm florestas bem preservadas ao longo de suas margens, enquanto outros estão em processo de restauração. As espécies amazônicas se misturam com as da savana brasileira. Está se tornando mais quente e mais seco à medida que o clima muda. Para os cientistas climáticos e ecologistas da Woodwell e do IPAM, esse é o laboratório natural perfeito.

Como o primeiro projeto de pesquisa lançado naquele laboratório, o experimento com fogo ganhou muita atenção.

“O Grupo Amaggi mobilizou a sociedade, havia jornalistas, repórteres de jornais e bombeiros. Pessoas da empresa e pessoas das cidades locais”, lembra Nepstad. Era um território novo, queimando intencionalmente a floresta para saber como isso mudava a paisagem. “Foi muito emocionante.”

A cada novo ano de queima, as percepções se revelavam. Em um ano particularmente quente e seco, a floresta queimou ainda mais do que o previsto. Nepstad se lembra de ter visto as chamas, na altura das canelas, ainda queimando às 2h da manhã seguinte. A mortalidade das árvores depois disso saltou de 6% para 50%.

“Isso foi trágico para aquele trecho de floresta”, diz Macedo. “Mas produziu percepções realmente importantes. Quase presciente. Basta olhar para 2023: foi um ano incrivelmente seco na Amazônia e, de repente, vimos florestas no meio da floresta tropical – áreas que costumavam ser muito úmidas para queimar agora podem queimar durante uma grande seca.”

Com o experimento de fogo em andamento, ainda havia quase 200.000 acres de terra disponíveis para estudo, então Nepstad convidou pesquisadores como Macedo, Coe e o Dr. Paulo Brando, que trabalhou com Nepstad no Pará, para explorar que outras histórias a Tanguro poderia contar sobre a Amazônia. Em seus 20 anos de história, mais de 180 artigos foram publicados a partir de pesquisas na estação, variando em tópicos desde mudanças hidrológicas até os limites climáticos da agricultura produtiva, a degradação do carbono florestal e o valor dos excrementos de anta para restauração. Brando atribui os resultados prolíficos da estação ao conhecimento de sua equipe.

“Parte da magia da Tanguro é aprender com as pessoas que trabalham há 20 anos na floresta. Eles têm um senso intuitivo do que está acontecendo com a saúde dessas florestas”, diz Brando.

Outro aspecto exclusivo da localização da Tanguro é sua posição em relação ao ecossistema maior. As centenas de pequenos riachos que cruzam a Tanguro formam as cabeceiras do rio Xingu, um importante afluente do tronco principal do Amazonas. Tanguro fica a apenas 60 quilômetros da Terra Indígena Xingu, por onde corre o rio de mesmo nome. Quaisquer distúrbios a montante de nutrientes, sedimentos ou fluxo de saída do córrego têm o potencial de se propagar até a reserva, afetando os meios de subsistência das comunidades indígenas.

“Os cursos d’água que estamos explorando na Tanguro fluem para a Reserva do Xingu. Portanto, é importante entender essas questões científicas de como a qualidade da água está sendo afetada pela agricultura como uma questão transfronteiriça”, diz Macedo. “A água conecta tudo.”

Conexão com a comunidade

Quando a Coordenadora Geral da Tanguro, Dra. Ludmila Rattis, iniciou sua pesquisa de pós-doutorado na estação de campo, Canarana era uma cidade diferente – pequena e dominada por homens o suficiente para que uma cientista ambiental não tivesse esperança de permanecer anônima. Rattis via seu nome escrito na comnda do bar como “menina do IPAM”. Ao andar na rua, sentia os olhares e às vezes era abordada por pessoas perguntando se ela trabalhava com os indígenas.

Era um lugar difícil de se estar, lembra ela. “Eu me sentia observada o tempo todo. Eu não podia fazer nada sem trazer comigo o nome de uma instituição. E a conexão com a Internet era de menos de um megabyte, não dava para assistir filmes em streaming”, diz Rattis. “Abrir um e-mail era um desafio.”

Trabalhar para uma organização ambiental sem fins lucrativos em uma cidade agrícola que deve sua própria existência ao desmatamento é, às vezes, difícil de navegar. Mas a agricultura está entrelaçada no DNA da Estação de Campo de Tanguro. Os cientistas do clima podem se arrepiar ao ver escavadeiras pressionando a vegetação rasteira, mas em última análise, a proximidade com a agricultura aqui levou a algumas das percepções mais valiosas da estação.

“Por estarmos neste lugar há muito tempo, podemos observar as mudanças à medida que elas ocorrem e dizer algo com muito mais confiança sobre os impactos mais amplos na Amazônia”, diz Macedo.

A parceria com o Grupo Amaggi também ajudou a conectar a ciência a grandes decisões no setor de soja. Em 2012, quando os debates sobre o futuro do Código Florestal brasileiro estavam em pleno andamento, Nepstad foi convidado a participar de uma viagem de campo a Tanguro com os principais legisladores que estavam elaborando o novo código, incluindo o senador Blairo Maggi, proprietário do Grupo Amaggi. Ver em primeira mão os experimentos de restauração florestal na estação ajudou a demonstrar a viabilidade da implementação das novas proteções. O Código Florestal foi revisado e a maioria de suas restrições ao desmatamento ainda está em vigor.

“Foi realmente a ciência que abriu essas portas”, diz Nepstad.

A pesquisa de Rattis, em particular, contribuiu para fortalecer as parcerias com fazendas da região. Ela passou o ano em Canarana conversando com os agricultores sobre a experiência deles com as mudanças climáticas – estações chuvosas que começam mais tarde, queda na produtividade das colheitas – e perguntando quais informações os modelos climáticos poderiam ser úteis. Aos poucos, à medida que Rattis apresentava a eles seus resultados, mostrando-lhes as previsões de chuva e temperatura e mantendo um diálogo aberto, ela construiu um relacionamento que não só fortaleceu sua relação com a comunidade, mas ajudou a orientar pesquisas futuras.

“Os fazendeiros lhe dirão se algo parece certo ou não, e 90% das vezes eles dirão ‘uau, você pode me enviar esse gráfico? Quero mostrar aos meus vizinhos’”, diz Rattis. Um novo estudo começou depois que conversas com um gerente de fazenda sugeriram uma conexão entre as florestas e a produção agrícola. “Eu disse que estávamos nos perguntando se as plantações produziriam mais perto da floresta, e ele disse: ‘isso faz sentido porque as plantas de algodão são maiores perto da borda da mata’.”

Os pesquisadores da Tanguro também estabeleceram conexões com os moradores da reserva indígena do Xingu, nas proximidades, formando parcerias com as aldeias para estudar os impactos a jusante dos incêndios recorrentes. Um professor da Universidade Federal da Amazônia (UFRA), Dr. Divino Silvério, que realizou sua pesquisa de doutorado no Tanguro, liderou grande parte desse trabalho.

“A ideia principal era integrar o conhecimento científico que tínhamos na Tanguro com o conhecimento tradicional dos povos indígenas, para quantificar melhor os impactos do fogo sobre as espécies que são usadas por eles para alimentação, construção e medicina”, diz Silvério.

Durante o estudo, Silvério e sua equipe de pesquisa visitaram a reserva do Xingu para discutir a pesquisa e compartilhar percepções. Eles também forneceram bolsas de estudo a vários estudantes indígenas para ajudar na coleta de dados e visitar a Tanguro para uma troca de conhecimentos.

“Os povos indígenas vêm manejando bem as florestas há séculos”, diz Silvério. “Mas agora temos a mudança climática. Está se tornando realmente urgente ter esse tipo de conversa no sentido de encontrar algumas soluções para mitigar os impactos das mudanças climáticas sobre os meios de subsistência dessas pessoas.”

Rattis também acredita que a Tanguro tem um papel a desempenhar como um centro educacional. No último ano, ela tem trabalhado para criar um prêmio de redação para estudantes locais, homenageando um funcionário do IPAM que defendeu a educação ambiental nos anos 2000.

“A Tanguro que temos hoje é o legado de muitas pessoas que trabalharam lá”, diz Rattis.

Como será o futuro?

Maracahipes-Santos já escalou essa torre milhares de vezes. Hoje ele sobe mais uma vez para prender uma corda sobressalente em um de seus suportes superiores. Se um de nós desmaiar

no meio da escalada, pelo menos eles poderão nos descer com cuidado. Se tudo der certo, escalaremos os 35 metros para cima e para trás com nossa própria força, ancorados no centro da torre com um mecanismo que trava como um cinto de segurança sob força repentina para baixo.

A torre em si é essencialmente uma escada coberta de vegetação, com vários medidores de gás e de temperatura presos a postes finos no topo. Três deles estão localizados ao redor da Tanguro para monitorar o movimento de dióxido de carbono, vapor de água e outros gases que entram e saem da paisagem. Essa torre em particular fica a 15 minutos de caminhada em uma seção de floresta intacta que foi usada como local de controle durante o experimento de incêndio.

Depois de verificar e verificar novamente minhas cordas, um grito de Maracahipes-Santos, que já estava no topo, sinalizou que era hora de começar a escalada.

Uma mão sobe um degrau, depois a outra. Os pés acompanham. Passo, passo, respire. Você deve se inclinar para trás, deixar que o arnês o segure e empurrar seu peso para cima com as pernas, mas um instinto inabalável me faz puxar com força a escada, de modo que, quando chego ao topo, meus antebraços estão tremendo. Suada, ofegante, corada, mas finalmente sobre o galpão. Maracahipes-Santos sorri e prende meu gancho de segurança em um dos suportes. Aqui em cima, somos mais altos do que as árvores.

Do alto da torre, você pode ler a história e o futuro desse lugar apenas virando a cabeça. A floresta se estende até o horizonte em uma direção, um mosaico ininterrupto de verde profundo. Em outro, é possível ver retângulos enormes de terra vermelha e tapetes uniformes de soja verde-clara cortados na paisagem. Em algum lugar escondido atrás de um bosque de eucaliptos plantados estão os telhados de metal corrugado da estação de pesquisa. A chuva está caindo no horizonte.

Há poucas décadas, tudo isso era floresta. Apenas outro aglomerado impossivelmente espesso de organismos vivos que respiram, morrem e crescem novamente em um dos ecossistemas de maior biodiversidade do planeta. Agora, os instrumentos de sensoriamento remoto documentam seu declínio.

A pesquisa na Tanguro é orientada por uma grande questão: “Qual é o futuro da Amazônia?” Mas a resposta a essa pergunta dependerá: dos cientistas que continuarem a vir a Tanguro para entender como esse ecossistema está mudando; dos técnicos de campo que tornarem possível conduzir a ciência na floresta com segurança; dos fazendeiros que se orgulharem de cuidar das florestas que estão em suas terras; dos funcionários do governo que criarem políticas que reflitam a ciência; e das decisões de pessoas a milhares de quilômetros de distância para reverter a mudança climática.

“Quando se faz uma pesquisa sobre essa floresta, percebe-se que é um sistema incrivelmente resistente, que agora está enfrentando estresses e distúrbios cada vez mais fortes. Portanto, ele precisa de ajuda e precisa ter uma chance, mas continuará”, diz Nepstad. “E acho que a Tanguro tem um papel importante nisso.”

Os últimos 20 anos na Tanguro contribuíram para direcionar a Amazônia para um futuro mais promissor. O que os próximos 20 anos nos trarão?

“Minha esperança”, diz Rattis, “é que em 20 anos não estaremos mais lidando com o desmatamento. ‘Lembra-se daquela vez em que tivemos que convencer as pessoas a não derrubar a floresta? Estou muito feliz por termos superado isso’”.

The sky opens up just as our truck leaves the last stretch of paved road. Water Program Director Dr. Marcia Macedo squints to stay focused on what she can see between wipes of the windshield. Within minutes, our path is transformed from a dirt road into a riverbed of bright orange mud, rutted from the passing of heavy trucks carrying soy off surrounding farms. Macedo swerves to dodge bumps and dips, but pretty soon there are more of them than there is flat road. We brace for the puddles, peering out windows spattered with orange spray.

It’s a Monday morning in the rainy season at the edge of the Amazon, and we’re commuting to work.

Tanguro Field Station lies about an hour’s drive from Canarana, the nearest town, located in a region of Brazil sometimes referred to as the arc of deforestation. Several decades ago, agriculture began surging into the southern reaches of the Amazon rainforest here, carving out rectangular patches of farmland from primary forest. For most of our drive, we are flanked only by mega-fields of soybean or scrubby cattle pastures.

Macedo, who has been conducting research at Tanguro since 2007, remembers a time when the drive could be marked by crossing a threshold from the Cerrado—Brazil’s woody savanna biome—into the Amazon. Now, clearing near the road has obscured that natural transition. Eventually clumps of lush green loom closer out of the rain and we know we’re nearly there.

Since its founding in 2004, Tanguro has offered researchers from around the world the opportunity to investigate big questions about how climate change and deforestation are affecting the Amazon. Macedo and her team have come to study Tanguro’s streams and reservoirs. 

We pull to a stop outside the research station, hauling suitcases wrapped in plastic trash bags out of the truck bed. Research assistant Zoë Dietrich, clutches several vital electronic components to her chest, ferrying them to a screened-in porch to keep them out of the rain. Postdoctoral researcher Dr. Abra Atwood starts digging out sediment core tubes from a pile of equipment. The clouds drift off and the work day at Tanguro begins.

I. The Founding

It was a controversial decision at the time. “The decision to set up on the Tanguro ranch almost drove a wedge through us,” recalls Tanguro founder, Dr. Daniel Nepstad. “We had a discussion that lasted two days.”

Fourteen years prior, Nepstad had established the Amazon program at Woodwell Climate (then the Woods Hole Research Center) in the state of Pará, studying the resilience of Amazon forests during long dry seasons. This work gave rise to a new research institute based in Brazil. In 1995, Nepstad co-founded the Amazon Environmental Research Institute (IPAM) in Belém to pursue policy-relevant science that could inform sustainable development in the Amazon. Woodwell Climate and IPAM began conducting simulated drought experiments and found that the rainforest, long thought to be immune to fire, lost that resistance during severe droughts. To investigate the implications of this, Nepstad realized, they needed a new experiment somewhere at the edge of the Amazon, where it’s drier year-round.

Nepstad had been spending more and more time in the state of Mato Grosso, fascinated by the expansion of soybean cultivation into the Amazon there. During his search for a new study site, Grupo Amaggi reached out with a remarkable invitation.

Grupo Amaggi was, at the time, the largest soy producer in the world, and soy was rapidly becoming environmental enemy number one, as hundreds of thousands of acres of forests fell to expand its cultivation.

“But Grupo Amaggi, a Brazilian company, wanted to get out in front of the issue,” says Nepstad. The prospect of losing a major market in Europe raised questions about the best way forward. In 2002 they set up the first system for tracing the forest practices of the farmers who sold them soy. And in 2004 they extended an invitation to Nepstad to study the forests on their newly acquired Tanguro property— an amalgamation of previously-cleared cattle ranches they were in the process of converting to soy fields. 

The hope was that the research would demonstrate to the world what was really happening in these massive soy farms in the Amazon, providing data that could contribute to conversations around sustainable soy.

“Twenty years ago there were lots of discussions about environmental preservation and agriculture,” says Grupo Amaggi’s ESG, Communications and Compliance Director, Juliana de Lavor Lopes. “Could those two create a symbiosis? I think we knew [they] could work together, but could we prove that?”

 For Nepstad, the invitation was also the perfect opportunity to run a controlled fire experiment in an ideal location. After much debate, IPAM decided to accept. 

“There were a lot of folks worried that this would ruin our reputation, undermine our credibility with grassroots organizations— a lot of NGOs felt like we were selling out,” says Nepstad. “Some people accused us of being bought off by Grupo Amaggi.”

But Nepstad was very clear on the terms of the partnership. They would accept no money from the company other than what Grupo Amaggi invested in the buildings on the research station campus. And they would only support the farm’s activities as far as the science allowed. The research would accurately report the impacts of agriculture on the forest, with no restrictions on publication. 

So in 2004, barely funded, but accompanied by a dedicated team of field technicians and researchers from the drought experiments in Pará— some of whom are still employed at the field station today— Woodwell and IPAM set up camp at Tanguro.

II. Life at the Station

Muddy boots start lining up outside the door to the cafeteria at 11:50am. Dona Lúcia sets lunch out promptly at noon. 

Maria Lúcia Pinheiro Nascimento has run the kitchen at Tanguro for over 16 years, cooking filling meals for hungry scientists and field technicians three times a day. Lunch and dinner usually involve some slow-cooked or grilled meat, rice, beans, and a fresh salad or roasted vegetables. Today there’s abóbora, a green-skinned pumpkin, and leftover sausage and brisket from last night’s churrasco. Breakfast is a lighter affair— pão de queijo, eggs, fresh bread, fruit, and coffee— set out and scarfed down before work starts at 7 am.

Many of the technicians who live and work here five days a week say Tanguro is like a second home, their peers a second family. For Dona Lúcia, as she’s called by staff and visitors alike, cooking for the research station isn’t just like cooking for family. It is cooking for family. Her husband, Sebastião Nascimento, “Seu Bate”, was one of the original field technicians working on the drought experiment in Pará. He flew down to join the crew at Tanguro a year after it was founded and brought his family down a year later, including his son, Ebis Pinheiro de Nascimento, who also joined as a field technician. A third technician from Pará, Raimundo Mota Quintino, known as “Santarém”, joined the family when he married Dona Lúcia’s daughter. 

“I’m with my family,” she says. “It gives me joy.”

Related or not, the team at Tanguro works together like a family. Cooperation and respect are essential in a place as remote and disconnected (wifi only extends 60ft from the cafeteria building) as Tanguro. 

“We joke that it’s like “Big Brother”,” says Field Manager, Darlisson Nunes da Costa. “But we are really united and we respect each other. That’s a wonderful environment to work in.” 

It can also be a physically challenging environment, with long days in the heat and humidity, navigating safety concerns in a forest full of snakes and jaguars, territorial wild pigs and terrain that could easily twist an ankle. All the while ensuring the scientists get the data they need.

Every field technician has to be adaptable and multi-talented, because aside from meal times there is no day-to-day routine. Your morning might involve slashing vines to find a path to a hidden stream, selected from satellite imagery as a sampling location. The afternoon could be spent troubleshooting errors at one of the carbon-monitoring towers. 

“We can’t say we have a fixed job,” says Seu Bate. “We do a bit of everything.”

All the same, the technicians have each developed their specialties over the decades. Santarém still uses waterman skills from his previous job as a fishing guide in the port city in Pará that gave him his nickname. He takes the canoe out on the reservoirs often, helping researchers pull sediment cores. Seu Bate can build whatever you need— whether it’s the aluminum base for a floating methane-monitoring chamber, or a custom collar to hold unwieldy soil core tubes while you sample them, just give him 20 minutes and some power tools. Nunes da Costa keeps the team’s field activities organized each week and can effortlessly cut a clear path through the forest. Ebis enjoys data collection, especially when it involves sampling the water or fishes in Tanguro’s waterways. For the station’s Scientific Projects Coordinator, Dr. Leonardo Maracahipes-Santos, climbing the 118 ft carbon tower is just like walking.

Outsider visits to Tanguro fluctuate. Sometimes weeks pass with only the field techs in residence, and sometimes the station’s small cabin-style houses and cheerful cafeteria are crawling with guests.

This spring has already been a busy one. Maracahipes-Santos handles day-to-day operations and organizes the rotating cast of visitors. In a few short weeks, he went from touring  a crew of Brazilian journalists around the study sites, to working with collaborators from the Max Planck institute on routine maintenance to the carbon towers, to coordinating conversations between visiting researchers and Grupo Amaggi representatives about removing several dams on the property. 

And even during slow weeks, there is plenty of science left to do—collecting samples for ongoing studies, running data analyses, checking on equipment. A day off is hard to come by at Tanguro, but at least it’s never boring.

“It’s very interesting, because we are part of a grand thing, which is to set up experiments in the field together with scientists,” says Nunes da Costa. “And we feel a little bit like scientists, because this whole business all starts on the ground. We can start from a piece of wood placed on the ground, and get all the way up to a scientific article. I feel very proud. Not only of me, but of the whole team.”

For her part, Dona Lúcia takes great pride in feeding the science at Tanguro. 

“I’m very proud to be in a company like this, today,” says Dona Lúcia. “Nowadays, to work in a company like this, you need a degree, and I don’t have one. I don’t have a culinary degree. I don’t have any degree. But I learn every day.”

III. A Natural Laboratory

Field work wraps up at 4pm, leaving Macedo, Atwood, Nunes da Costa, and me sweaty and exhausted from an afternoon spent trudging through uneven wetlands to find stream channels. Atwood was dropping temperature loggers every 500 meters above and below reservoirs. She’s interested in the impacts these small water bodies have on the watershed, and how far downstream those impacts extend. But Amazonian streams often twist through impassable segments of marsh, so finding the sample sites requires vigorous hiking and a good machete. 

After our hike, we rendezvous with the group of visiting journalists at the Darro Reservoir. One of the largest reservoirs at Tanguro, the Darro provides water to the research station for showers and cleaning. On especially hot days, it also makes a great swimming hole. 

The water is warm—warmer than nearby streams, Atwood’s temperature data has confirmed—but still cooler than the muggy air. It’s also glassy clear. Our feet are visible treading the band of colder water down below. Billowing white reflections form on the surface, a perfect mirror of the clouds above.

Water is everything in the Amazon. It’s what makes the lush forests possible. It’s what connects a soy farm in Mato Grosso to estuaries at the yawing mouth of the Amazon River. And it’s what connects this region to the global climate. The clouds clustering above Darro grow heavier and darker with rain while we swim. Although much of that rain will fall back to Earth here, a large portion of it gets pushed out from the tropics to fall in other places.

“Water does two things,” says Woodwell Tropics Program Director, Dr. Mike Coe. “One: it’s rainfall somewhere else. Two: water is energy. It takes a huge amount of energy to evaporate water and that energy gets released somewhere else when it rains. So the energy from the sun that falls here gets transported around the world. That’s huge. That drives climate.”

Which means that, through water, changes here have the potential to cause major changes across the globe. Tanguro’s location in a region of the Amazon that underwent intense deforestation for agriculture just a few decades ago makes it an ideal place to study that cause and effect.

“Once you remove forests from the landscape, you change some things fundamentally that you can’t really undo,” says Macedo. “You change the amount of water in streams, you change the rooting depth of the plants on the landscape, you change the entire hydrological cycle.” 

Tanguro is pretty representative of the changes experienced across the region. It’s a patchwork of natural forest, soy and cotton fields, and some planted eucalyptus groves. Some of its watersheds lie completely within the bounds of the forest, others run completely through agricultural land. Some streams have well preserved forests along their banks, while others are in the process of restoration. Amazonian species mix with those from the Brazilian savanna. It’s becoming hotter and drier as the climate changes. For the climate scientists and ecologists at Woodwell and IPAM, it’s the perfect natural laboratory. 

As the first research project launched in that laboratory, the fire experiment garnered much fanfare.

“Grupo Amaggi had mobilized society, there were journalists and newspaper reporters and firefighters. People from the company and people from the local towns,” recalls Nepstad. It was new territory, intentionally burning the forest to learn how it changed the landscape. “It was really exciting.”

With each new year of burning, insights revealed themselves. One particularly hot, dry year, the forest burned even more than predicted. Nepstad recalled seeing flames, shin-high, still burning at 2 am the next morning. Tree mortality afterward jumped from its usual 6% up to 50%.

“That was tragic for that patch of forest,” says Macedo. “But it has yielded really important insights. Almost prescient. Just look at 2023: it was an incredibly dry year in the Amazon, and all of a sudden we saw fires in the very middle of the rainforest—areas that used to be much too wet to burn can now burn during a big drought.” 

With the fire experiment underway, there was still nearly 200,000 acres of land available to study, so Nepstad invited researchers like Macedo, Coe, and Dr. Paulo Brando, who worked with Nepstad in Pará, to explore what other stories Tanguro might be able to tell about the Amazon. In its 20 year history, over 180 papers have been published from research at the station, ranging in topic from hydrologic changes, to the climatic limits on productive agriculture, to the degradation of forest carbon, to the value of tapir poop for restoration. Brando attributes the station’s prolific results to the knowledge of its staff.

“Part of Tanguro’s magic is to learn from the people who have been working for 20 years in the forest. They have an intuitive sense of what is happening with these forests’ health,” says Brando.

Another unique aspect of Tanguro’s location is where it sits in relation to the larger ecosystem. The hundreds of small streams that criss-cross Tanguro form the headwaters of the Xingu River—a major tributary to the main stem of the Amazon. Tanguro is just 60 kilometers from the Xingu Indigenous Territory, through which the river of the same name runs. Any upstream disturbances to nutrients, sediments, or stream outflow have the potential to ripple down to the reserve, impacting the livelihoods of Indigenous communities within. 

“The headwater streams that we’re studying here at Tanguro drain into the Xingu reserve. So, these scientific questions of how water quality is being impacted by agriculture are important to understand as a cross-boundary issue,” says Macedo. “Water connects everything.”

IV. Connecting to the Community

When Tanguro General Coordinator, Dr. Ludmila Rattis, started her postdoctoral research at the field station, Canarana was a different town—small and male-dominated enough that a female environmental scientist had no hope of staying anonymous. Rattis would see her name written on bar tabs as “IPAM’s girl.” She went for runs and felt the stares.

It was a hard place to be, she recalls. “I felt watched all the time. I couldn’t do anything without bringing with me the name of an institution. And the internet connection was less than one megabyte, so Netflix was a challenge,” Rattis says. “Opening an email was a challenge.”

Working for an environmental non-profit in a farm town that owes its very existence to deforestation is sometimes tricky to navigate. But agriculture is woven into the DNA of Tanguro Field Station. Climate scientists may flinch to see bulldozers pressing into the undergrowth, but ultimately the proximity to agriculture here is what has yielded some of the station’s most valuable insights. 

“By being here in this place for a long time, we’re able to observe changes as they happen, and say something much more confidently about what the broader impacts are on the Amazon,” says Macedo.

The partnership with Grupo Amaggi has also helped connect science to big decisions in the soy sector. In 2012, when debates over the future of Brazil’s forest code were roaring away, Nepstad was invited to join a field trip to Tanguro with the main lawmakers shaping the new code—including Senator Blairo Maggi, an owner of Grupo Amaggi. Seeing firsthand the experiments with forest restoration at the station helped demonstrate the feasibility of implementing the new protections. The forest code was revised and most of its restrictions on forest clearing are still in place today.

“It was really the science that opened these doors,” says Nepstad. 

Rattis’s research, in particular, has gone a long way toward strengthening partnerships with farms around the region. She spent her year in Canarana talking with farmers about their experience of climate change—rainy seasons starting later, crop yields dropping—and asking what information they might find useful from climate models. Slowly, as she came back to them with her results, showing them rainfall and temperature predictions and keeping a dialogue open, she built a rapport that not only strengthened her relationship with the community, but helped guide future research. 

“The farmers will tell you whether something looks right or not, and 90% of the time they’d say ‘wow, can you please send me that graphic? I want to show my neighbors,’” says Rattis. One new study even began after conversations with a farm manager hinted at a connection between forests and crop production. “I said we were wondering if the crops would produce more closer to the forest, and he said, ‘that makes sense because the cotton plants are bigger closer to the forest edge.’”

Researchers at Tanguro have also built connections with residents of the nearby Xingu Indigenous reserve, partnering with villages to study the downstream impacts of recurring fires. A professor with the Federal University of the Amazon (UFRA), Dr. Divino Silvério, who conducted his doctoral research at Tanguro, has led much of this work. 

“The main idea was to integrate the scientific knowledge we had at Tanguro, with the traditional knowledge of the Indigenous people, to better quantify the impacts of fire on species that are used by them for food, construction, and medicine,” says Silvério. 

 During the study, Silvério and his research team visited the Xingu reserve to discuss the research and share insights. They also provided scholarships to several Indigenous students to help in the data collection and visit Tanguro for a knowledge exchange. 

“Indigenous people have been managing the forests well for centuries,” says Silvério. “But now we have climate change. It’s becoming really urgent to have these kinds of conversations, to come up with some solutions to mitigate the impacts of climate change on the livelihoods of these people.”

Rattis also believes Tanguro has a role to play as an education hub. Over the last year she has been working to create an essay prize for local students, honoring an IPAM employee who championed environmental education in the 2000s.

“The Tanguro we have today is the legacy of the many people that have worked there,” says Rattis.

V. What does the future look like?

Maracahipes-Santos has climbed this tower a thousand times. Today he’s climbing it once more, to anchor a back-up belay line to one of its top struts. If one of us passes out mid-climb, at least they’ll be able to lower us down gently. If all goes well, we will be climbing the 118 feet up and back under our own power, anchored to the center of the tower with a mechanism that locks like a seatbelt under sudden downward force.

The tower itself is essentially an overgrown ladder, with various gas and weather analyzers strapped to spindly poles at the top. There are three of them stationed around Tanguro to monitor the movement of carbon dioxide, water vapor, and other gasses into and out of the landscape. This particular tower is a 15 minute hike into a section of intact forest that was used as the control site during the fire experiment. 

After checking and rechecking my tethers, a shout from Maracahipes-Santos, already at the top, signaled it was time to start the climb.

One hand up a rung, then the other. Feet to follow. Step, step, breathe. You’re supposed to lean back, let the harness hold you and push your weight up with your legs, but an unshakable instinct makes me pull tight to the ladder, so when I reach the top my forearms are shaking. Sweaty, breathless, flushed, but above the canopy at last. Maracahipes-Santos smiles and attaches my safety hook to one of the struts. Up here, we are taller than the trees.

From the top of the tower, you can read the history and future of this place, just by turning your head. Forest stretches to the horizon in one direction, an unbroken mosaic of deep green. In another, you can see massive rectangles of red dirt and uniform carpets of pale green soy cut into the landscape. Somewhere hidden behind a copse of planted eucalyptus are the corrugated metal roofs of the research station. Rain is falling on the horizon. 

Not too many decades ago, this was all forest. Just another impossibly thick cluster of living organisms breathing and dying and growing anew in one of the most densely biodiverse ecosystems on the planet. Now, the vigilant scientific instruments whizzing away up here document its decline. 

Research at Tanguro is driven by one big question: “What is the future of the Amazon?” But the answer to that question will depend — on scientists continuing to come to Tanguro to understand how this ecosystem is changing, on the field technicians making it possible to conduct science in the forest safely, on farmers taking pride in caring for the forests that stand on their land, on government officials building policies that reflect science, and on the decisions of people thousands of miles away to reverse climate change.   

“When you’re doing research on this forest, you realize it is an amazingly tough system that is now being faced with tougher and tougher stresses and disturbances. So it needs help, and it needs to be given a chance, but it will continue,” says Nepstad. “And I think Tanguro has a big role to play in that.”

The past 20 years at Tanguro have done much to point the Amazon towards a more hopeful future. What will the next 20 bring?

“My hope,” says Rattis, “is that in 20 years we won’t be dealing with deforestation anymore. ‘Remember that time when we had to convince people not to cut down the forest? I’m so glad we’re past that.’”

When boreal forests burn in the Far North of the U.S. and Canada, the whole world feels the impact. From communities evacuating from the blazes, to smoke clogging the air thousands of miles to the south, to the release of carbon emissions that accelerate climate change, boreal forest fires are a global issue. 

Research from Woodwell Climate has recently expanded our understanding of the scope of impact that boreal fires have. A new paper, led by Research Associate Stefano Potter, quantified emissions associated with fires across most of boreal North America, shedding light on the dynamics of boreal fires and climate change. These four graphics explain:

1. Boreal fires threaten an important carbon sink.

Using a new higher-resolution dataset, generated as part of NASA’s Arctic-Boreal Vulnerability Experiment (ABoVE), Potter and his co-authors created a map of burned area across the boreal region. The researchers combined satellite imagery with observations from the largest database of boreal field studies, which allowed them to calculate emissions from both vegetation burned aboveground, and organic matter in the soils that burned belowground.

The results show that the overwhelming majority of carbon emissions from boreal fires—over 80% of total emissions in most places—comes from soils rather than trees. Despite the dramatic imagery of burning forests, most of the real damage is happening below the ground.

2. The true impact of boreal emissions is currently underestimated.

That finding on its own was not surprising to researchers, as the majority of carbon in boreal forests is stored below the ground. However, the fact that the overwhelming contribution of belowground carbon to fire emissions is being left out of existing global fire and climate models, means we’re drastically underestimating carbon emissions from Arctic and Boreal environments.

“A large reason for that is because the [existing] models are not detecting the belowground carbon combustion, which we are modeling directly,” says Potter. 

Potter and the team working on the paper were able to accurately model belowground carbon loss because of their machine learning approach and the abundance of available field measurements in their dataset. 

Accurately representing these numbers in global fire models is critical, because these models are used to plot climate trajectories and inform carbon budgets, which tell us how much we need to cut emissions to stay below temperature thresholds like 1.5 or 2 degrees C.

3. Boreal fires are becoming more intense.

It is becoming more urgent to get an accurate understanding of boreal emissions, because boreal fires are becoming larger, more frequent and more intense. Burned area has increased as fire seasons stretch longer, return intervals between fires shorten, and single ignitions can result in massive blazes that burn further and deeper and cause greater carbon loss.

In 2023, for example, while the number of ignitions has been lower than most years since the 1990s, burned area as of August has far surpassed any year in the past three decades.

4.Fire suppression can be a cost effective protection against carbon loss.

Ultimately, preventing carbon loss from boreal forest fires will require bringing down emissions from other sources and curbing warming to get fires back within historical levels. But preventing boreal forests from burning in the short term can offer a climate solution that could buy time to reduce other emissions. 

A collaborative study between Woodwell Climate and the Union of Concerned Scientists, published in Science Advances, modeled the cost effectiveness of deploying fire suppression in boreal North America and found that actively combatting boreal fires could cost as little as 13 dollars per ton of CO₂ emissions avoided—a cost on par with other carbon mitigation solutions like onshore wind or utility-scale solar. Informed by this data, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has decided to start combating fires in Yukon Flats National Wildlife Refuge, not only when they present a threat to human health, but also with the intent of preventing significant carbon losses. Yukon Flats is underlain by large swaths of carbon-rich permafrost soils, at risk of thawing and combusting in deep-burning fires.

Deepening our understanding of the complex boreal system with further research will help inform additional strategies for bringing emissions under control, preventing devastating fires that threaten human health both regionally, and across the globe.

Summit County, Utah is preparing for a changing climate. 

The high-elevation county boasts a strong winter sports economy, vast swaths of national forest and agricultural land, and a population of 43,000 people that stand to be affected by climate-driven changes. The risks to the county’s health and economy from climate change were outlined in a recent report by Woodwell Climate, and shared with the community through the first in a series of climate change and public health panels.

The risk assessment was completed as a part of the Center’s Just Access initiative to provide free climate risk insights to municipalities across the globe, in order to equip them for the changes ahead. Working with members of Summit County’s Sustainability Department, as well as members of the community at large, the Woodwell team targeted three major climate risk variables for analysis— drought, water scarcity, and wildfire.

According to Emily Quinton, Sustainability Program Manager for Summit County, these risks are ones the county is already concerned about, based on existing conditions, but wanted to know what that would mean for them in coming decades. 

“We have some good baseline knowledge about the risks we are facing already,” Quinton said. “What was different and new that the Woodwell assessment could offer was those much longer-term future projections.”

In Summit County, the Sustainability Department is a subset of the Public Health Department, which encouraged the risk assessment to delve into the ways in which climate risks affect the health of county residents. Changes in water availability were a particular concern for the department.

The report found that the northern and easternmost portions of the county are most likely to be affected by drought. Summit County is already experiencing severe drought conditions 40% of the year; that number is expected to increase to 50% by midcentury.

Water scarcity will also increase. Driven by both increasing demand from the population and decreasing availability, water scarcity in most communities within Summit County is expected to be at 189% by 2030— meaning demand will be nearly twice that of available supply.

“With the drought and water scarcity topics,” said Quinton, “making the connection between how a decrease in water quantity will place risk on water quality was important. Monitoring water quality is a really crucial responsibility of the Public Health Department.”

Woodwell Research Assistant, Darcy Glenn, who worked previously in Summit County’s Sustainability Department and helped facilitate the production of the report says, “If you don’t have any water in your wells, water quality goes down because you don’t have enough to dilute any contaminant that might be a problem.”

Summit County currently grapples with wildfire threat as well. Wildfire danger days— in which temperature and moisture conditions make fires more likely to burn out of control— will become a more common occurrence, leading to fires that cause more evacuations, damage, and air quality concerns. The majority of the county will add eight or more wildfire danger days to their year by the end of the century.

Climate Change and Public Health

Public health can be a less polarizing context in which to discuss climate risks publicly. Despite the political nature surrounding climate change in some regions, Glenn notes public health can serve as a lens most people relate to and take seriously. 

“It can be hit or miss on climate change, but if your kid has asthma, you want to know about your air quality. Changes in the environment, whether people acknowledge climate change or not, align with things they’ve seen,” says Glenn. “So we’re trying to approach the topic in a way that’s accessible and start a conversation that’s welcoming to the whole community.”

After the completion of the assessment, Woodwell Risk team members presented the information to the Summit County Board of Health, then opened up communications with the public. In May, the county’s Health Department hosted the first of three planned events in a speaker series, focused on sharing the results of the report to help county residents better understand the extent of risk where they live. Glenn spoke alongside local climate experts and took questions from attendees.

The next two events in the series will discuss the physical and mental health impacts of climate change, as well as some potential adaptation solutions. According to Quinton, these events will aid the county in developing plans for resilience that address the top concerns of the public. 

“Climate preparedness can’t happen without an understanding of what the potential risks are. The Climate Risk Assessment and the public events feel like important steps to more directly integrate climate change into the preparedness work Summit County is already doing,” says Quinton.

Canada’s fire season has barely started and it’s already on track to break records. So far, NOAA has documented more than 2,000 wildfires that have resulted in the forced evacuation of over 100,000 people across Canada. The most recent bout of fires burning in Ontario and Quebec has sent smoke southward into the Eastern U.S., causing record levels of air pollution in New York and warnings against outside activity as far south as Virginia.

Only a little over a month into the wildfire season, fires have already burned 13 times more land area than the 110-year average for this time of year, and they show no sign of stopping, according to Canadian publication The Star. Indigenous communities, some of whom live year-round in remote bush cabins, have been particularly harmed by the blazes.

According to Woodwell Climate Senior Scientist Dr. Jennifer Francis, the phenomenon of winds pushing smoke down to the northeastern U.S. has been linked to rapid Arctic warming caused by climate change.

In the upper atmosphere, a fast wind current called the jet stream flows from west to east in undulating waves, caused by the interaction of air masses with different temperatures and pressures, particularly between the Arctic and temperate latitudes.

As global temperatures have risen, the Arctic has warmed two to four times faster than the average global rate. Dr. Francis stated in an interview in the Boston Globe that the lessening of the temperature differences between the middle latitudes and the Arctic has slowed down the jet stream, which results in a more frequent occurrence of a wavy path.
Another factor contributing to the widespread smoke is an ongoing oceanic heat wave in the North Pacific Ocean. The blob of much-above-normal sea water tends to create a northward bulge in the jet stream, which creates a pattern that sends cooler air down to California and warm air northward into central Canada—resulting in the persistent heat wave there in recent weeks. Farther east, the jet stream then bends southward and brings the wildfire smoke down to the Northeast.

“Big waves in the jet stream tend to hang around a long time, and so the weather that they create is going to be very persistent,” Dr. Francis said. “If you are in the part of the wave in the jet stream that creates heat and drought, then you can expect it to last a long time and raise the risk of wildfire.”

The wildfires are also decimating North American and Canadian boreal forests, the latter of which holds 12 percent of the “world’s land-based carbon reserves,” according to the Audubon Society<./a> And three quarters of Canada’s woodlands and forests are in the boreal zone according to the Canadian government.

“The surface vegetation and the soil can dry out pretty dramatically given the right weather conditions. For this fuel, as we call it in fire science, it often just takes one single ignition source to generate a large wildfire,” said Woodwell Climate Associate Scientist Dr. Brendan Rogers.

As the climate continues to warm, Dr. Rogers said the weather conditions that lead to fuel drying and out-of-control wildfires also increase. This creates a feedback loop. Heat waves caused by greenhouse gas emissions increase the prevalence of wildfires. The fires in turn destroy these natural carbon sinks and, in turn, speed up climate change.

While the ultimate solution to breaking this feedback loop lies in reducing emissions and curbing climate change, Dr. Rogers and other researchers at Woodwell Climate have conducted research into fire suppression strategies that could help prevent large boreal fires from spreading and help keep carbon in the ground.

A study conducted in collaboration with Woodwell and other institutions found that suppressing fires early may be a cost-effective way to carbon mitigation. Woodwell Climate’s efforts also include mapping fires, using geospatial data and models to estimate carbon emissions across large scales, and looking at the interplay between fires and logging.

“Reducing boreal forest fires to near-historic levels and keeping carbon in the ground will require substantial investments. Nevertheless, these funds pale in comparison to the costs countries will face to cope with the growing health consequences exacerbated by worsening air quality and more frequent and intense climate impacts expected if emissions continue to rise unabated. Increased resources, flexibility, and carbon-focused fire management can also ensure wildlife, tourism, jobs, and many other facets of our society can persevere in a warming world,” Dr. Rogers said.

Transcript edited for grammar and clarity.

Sarah Ruiz: Fire. It’s a transformative force on any landscape, scorching and destroying, but often making space for new life. It also plays a part in transforming our global climate, releasing stored carbon from forests and other ecosystems that we simply cannot afford to add to our atmosphere. I’m here today with three of Woodwell Climate Research Center’s experts on fire and climate change: Dr. Manoela Machado, Dr. Brendan Rogers, and Dr. Zach Zobel. We’re here to discuss how fire fits into the climate change puzzle, as both a symptom and the cause of the warming climate. Consider this a “fireside chat” of sorts. Let’s begin.

Brendan, you work primarily in boreal forests, where fires are a natural part of the landscape, correct?

Dr. Brendan Rogers: Yes, that’s right. So even though boreal forests are in the north and they’re cold and damp for a lot of the year, the surface vegetation in the soil, the soil organic matter can dry out pretty dramatically in the summer. This fuel, as we call it in fire science, often all it takes is just one single ignition source to generate a pretty large wildfire. Humans certainly ignite fires, but still most of the burned area in boreal forests is coming from lightning ignitions.

Fire is also an important natural process in boreal forests. Many of the fires are what we call stand replacing—meaning they’re high intensity, they kill most of the trees, at least in Alaska and Canada. This initiates the process of forest succession, with often different types of vegetation, and tree species playing pretty key ecological roles. But fire regimes are changing and intensifying with climate change, taking us outside the range of what we would consider our natural variability that we’ve seen in these systems for millennia.

SR: Now, Manu, you work in the Amazon rainforest, where fire is never a natural part of the landscape. Can you explain what Kind of role fire plays in a tropical rainforest?

Dr. Manoela Machado: The Amazon biome did not evolve with fire pressure selecting for strategies of survival, which means that the plants are not adapted to this disturbance. Fire is a very powerful tool used to transform the landscape and has been used for millennia. Traditional and Indigenous communities still use it for agricultural purposes, but that’s not the fire that we see on the news, making headlines of “fire crisis in the Amazon.”

Those catastrophic events with lots of smoke in the atmosphere, they’re normally related to deforestation fires, which are fires used after clear cutting to clear out biomass and use the land for cattle ranching and other agricultural purposes. Those fires can escape into forest areas. So the ignition sources are always human—there are no natural ignition sources in the Amazon forest.

SR: With climate change, these dynamics are shifting in many places, as drier and hotter conditions make it easier for fires to spark. Zach, could you talk to us a little bit about what makes a forest susceptible to fire, and how climate change might be affecting that?

Dr. Zach Zobel: Fire weather is a given set of atmospheric parameters that indicate—if there was an ignition source—fire would be able to grow and spread rapidly. What we do is we model what is known as the fire weather index. This index consists of four different atmospheric variables, and those are: temperature (the hotter it is, the more likely vegetation is going to dry out quicker); relative humidity (the lower the humidity, the more rapidly vegetation can dry out); precipitation, both backward looking (“has it rained a lot recently”) and today; and wind speed, because once a fire starts, if the wind is adequately high, that’s when it’s going to spread.

We take those variables out of the climate models, and we model it—what it looks like historically, versus what it’s going to look like in the future. And what we find is that in several fire regimes, most of them actually, these “high fire risk days” are starting to rapidly increase.

We see it especially in the Mediterranean, Brazil, eastern Australia, the Western United States, in several parts of Africa. Over the next 30 years, we think these high fire risk days are going to increase on the order of a couple of weeks in some locations like the Western US, to upwards of one to two months in the Mediterranean and Brazil. And that’s pretty significant, when you think about how historically these days only occurred maybe one week a year. 

SR: So what are some of the risk outcomes posed by those more frequent, intense fires, globally?

BR: More frequent intense fires are changing the ecology of many boreal forests in some cases, leading to transition from forest to grassland or shrubland, which of course impacts the resident animals. But there are also large impacts on humans. The smoke from large wildfire seasons is a direct threat to human health, and rural and especially Indigenous communities often feel the largest impacts. Additionally, in areas of permafrost, which is ground that is frozen year after year, fires can lead to permafrost thaw for many years. That can often destabilize the ground leading to ground collapse, presenting a hazard to people that are living in these areas.

MM: I think the Amazon has many similarities with the Arctic, despite being very different environments. Despite not being natural, fires have become a recurrent issue that coincides with the dry season, which then creates what we call the burning season. Any fire is damaging to an environment that is not adapted to it. So there’s the immediate release of huge amounts of carbon when that biomass is burning, and there’s the delayed mortality that understory fires cause, so there’s continued emissions of carbon as well. That can cause a shift in species composition.

And fire also begets fire, which means that forest canopy that is disrupted allows more wind and sun to penetrate the forest, which creates drier microclimates. And tree mortality increases the fuels on the forest floor as well. So a degraded forest becomes even more vulnerable to future burning. As Brendon mentioned as well, there are several studies linking the burning season with higher hospitalization rates of people with respiratory illnesses as well.

SR: So, then what do these changes mean in terms of fire risk? How much of what we’re seeing now is on par with or accelerated compared to what climate models have been showing?

ZZ: Manu, and Brendan just hit it right on the head. What we’re seeing is the driver of these increasing high fire risk days, is largely because the length of the dry season is increasing in many of these fire regimes. Since they talked about the tropics and the Arctic, I’ll use California as an example. The dry season is typically from April to November or December. What makes California almost even more unique is that if this extends later and later into November and December, that’s when the Santa Ana winds start to pick up. So we found that that’s what’s happening in California, the wildfire season is expanding into later in the season. And that’s when their seasonal winds start, ahead of the rainy season.

In terms of risk to life and property, there’s also another factor that I think is a little underappreciated. (and this is happening in the Mediterranean and Australia and some of the major spots I talked about, maybe less so in Brazil, but Chile as well) is people are moving into areas that traditionally have had wildfires, even in the absence of climate change. And so, as we continue to build up property, let’s say in California, in the wildland urban interface as it’s known, that’s when you start to see things unfold, like we saw in 2019, in Australia and the Camp Fire as well in California.

When we talk with our partners, we always show them how rapidly the climate models are viewing this increase in fire weather days. We definitely caveat it by saying, Here’s what the observations are showing us. The climate models aren’t even keeping up with how quickly wildfire risk days are increasing. So we view it as is “this is the best-case scenario for the next 30 years.” And the best-case scenario is scary enough. And that’s kind of the message we send to the people that we work with when presenting this data.

SR: Not only do increased fires have immediate ecological and safety impacts. They also represent a significant risk to our ability to achieve climate goals. Forests are one of our most valuable carbon sinks, and keeping them healthy and standing is essential to curbing warming. Let’s talk a little bit about how fires pose a threat to that.

BR: So boreal forest fires release some of the largest amounts of carbon per unit area for any biome on Earth. And this is because most of the fuel is coming from the soil organic matter or Duff. And most of the climate impacts are from CO2 and methane. But actually, there’s a whole host of gases that are released into the atmosphere. And what’s worse, in areas of permafrost, those fires can induce permafrost thaw and degradation that can also release even more greenhouse gases over the ensuing years. This is what triggers the global feedback mechanisms from boreal fires—climate warming, leading to more fires, which leads to more net emissions of greenhouse gases that further fuels climate warming.

When we combine the carbon release estimates from intensifying fire regimes with the interactions between fire and permafrost thaw, the numbers are somewhat sobering. And they may impact our ability to meet the global temperature targets such as one and a half and two degrees above pre-industrial as set out in the Paris Climate Agreement. These impacts are largely not accounted for in climate models or remaining carbon budgets. So, one big question is what can we actually do about it?

I first want to stress that the fires themselves are not the cause of the problem. They’re a system response to warming. So ultimately, the solution is reducing and eliminating fossil fuel emissions that are warming our climate. That said, we do actually have some level of control over boreal fires through fire management control that we don’t have, for example, when it comes to other bigger system feedbacks. Our group has done some work to show that boreal fire management and specifically suppression of fires when they’re first ignited and relatively small, could be a cost effective way to keep carbon in the ground and protect against rapid permafrost thaw. Actually recently, for the first time, a land management agency in the US has adopted these ideas and designated land in Alaska to be protected from fire purely for the purpose of protecting permafrost and carbon. Of course, there are many, many considerations that come into play with changing land management, for example, the ecological impacts, and of course, the people that live on or near that land, including indigenous communities. So these are really complex decisions. But ultimately, as we’re hopefully headed down a path towards global net zero emissions, towards climate stabilization and eventual climate cooling. I think that limiting boreal fire emissions should be considered as a natural climate solution that also has many co-benefits for the habitat, for human health, and the economy.

SR: So Manu, is fire management also a potential solution for the Amazon?

MM: Um, I don’t think it’s a solution, I think is something that exists, but also kind of in tune with what Brendan was saying that fire is not the core of the issue. In the Amazon, deforestation is the major issue regarding climate change in general. So, this process of land grabbing and clearing for cattle ranching and cropland is the driver of deforestation and for as long as we have that, we will have these catastrophic fire events. These deforestation fires and the leakage that comes from that into forest areas, those are not things that firefighters can face with safety. These are intentional fires, and they’re part of the deforestation process. So, the path to ending these fires is through tackling deforestation. The other types of fires such as pasture fires, forest fires that are not in those areas of like frontier of deforestation, they can be dealt with through prevention and combat actions, such as preparing firebreaks ahead of the expected burning season, and having well trained, well equipped brigades ready for action. And that’s something that we’ve been trying to do as well. We’ve been providing GIS training to Indigenous fire brigades across the Amazon and developed some other partnerships as well with spatial analysis and trying to help out with science too, but the core issue is not fire it’s deforestation.

SR: So, combating fires and learning to manage them when they arise is important, as well as working with communities on the ground to do so. But the root cause of climate change lies in the vast amount of carbon emissions that are released by human activities. Ultimately, bringing fires under control will require mitigating emissions and curbing climate change, otherwise, forest fires might just become too hot to handle. Thank you, everyone, for sharing your perspectives on fire and climate change with us today.

Located in Eastern Alaska, the Yukon Flats National Wildlife Refuge is larger than many U.S. states. It’s a roadless landscape of rocky mountain outcroppings, flat meadows, treeless tundra, and dense spruce forests, bisected by the Yukon River and dotted with thousands of lakes and wetlands. Several Alaska Native communities call the refuge home and subsist off of its natural resources. This diverse, expansive wilderness is well adapted to fire, and it’s not uncommon to see pink fireweed blooms or young grass and seedlings sprouting from burn scars.

But the relationship between fire and land here—as in many places—has been changing as the climate warms. Yukon Flats sits atop ancient, ice-rich ground, called Yedoma permafrost, formed during the last ice age. Thawing Yedoma is a significant source of carbon dioxide and methane emissions to the atmosphere. Fire, made more intense and frequent by climate change, threatens to accelerate that thaw. In an effort to preserve carbon stores, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service recently dedicated 1.6 million acres of the Yukon Flats refuge to piloting a new firefighting regime, one designed to protect carbon, in addition to human lives and property.

Science builds the case for policy change

This decision was, in part, influenced by research led by Dr. Carly Phillips, during her time as a research scientist at the Union of Concerned Scientists, alongside Woodwell Climate Senior Science Policy Advisor, Dr. Peter Frumhoff, and Associate Scientist, Dr. Brendan Rogers. In a 2022 paper in Science Advances, the group quantified the threat boreal forest fires pose to climate goals. Wildfires in boreal North America alone could, by mid-century, use up 3% of remaining global carbon dioxide emissions associated with keeping temperatures below the Paris Agreement’s 1.5°C limit. This is a conservative estimate—the authors suggest the true numbers could be even larger as the accelerating effect of fires on permafrost thaw, and the release of other greenhouse gasses, were not included in the analysis. 

The study also examined the cost-effectiveness of combatting those fires as a potential climate solution. Molly Elder, an economics and public policy Ph.D. candidate at Tufts, performed an analysis of data from across Alaska’s fire management zones and found that actively suppressing boreal fires could cost less than 13 dollars per ton of carbon dioxide emissions avoided—putting it on par with other carbon mitigation solutions like onshore wind or utility-scale solar. 

“The work we did in this project proved and quantified what the management community already knew, which is that management is effective at reducing burned area when fires are actively suppressed,” says Elder.

Combating boreal fires could provide much needed mitigation, and at a low cost, but there are some logistical obstacles between the hypothetical model and actual implementation. Typically, in Alaska, boreal forest fires are left to burn unless they present a risk to human life or property. This is partly because these forests are fire-adapted, but also partly due to the sheer vastness of boreal wilderness. With limited resources, it is not always practical or possible to track down and put out a fire, especially in a place without roads like Yukon Flats. Firefighters are already stretched thin with lengthening and increasingly high-intensity fire seasons.

So the research group worked with the fire management community in Alaska, facilitated by the Alaska Fire Science Consortium, to better understand the needs of firefighters and demonstrate the co-benefits of fire suppression in addition to preserving carbon. 

“Many of the fire managers expressed how stretched their resources already were and resistance to the idea that yet another mandate would be added to their plate,” says Dr. Phillips. “However, after discussing the implications of our research, and the ambition that additional funding would come with any mandate, we got more buy-in.”

Fire suppression: It’s not a dirty word

The other concern managers raised was whether fire suppression would ultimately be successful in achieving their goals. Historically, fire suppression efforts in the US have been counterproductive to protecting forests.

In the late 1800s, lack of understanding of the ways Indigenous communities in Western states have used fire to maintain healthy forests resulted in decades of near-total suppression of fire in the region. In many western US forests, (adapted to what Dr. Rogers calls “high-frequency, low-intensity” fire) suppression allowed highly flammable, dry vegetation—which would normally be periodically burned away—to build up. When fires did spark, they were then capable of growing to a size and intensity that could damage, rather than activate, the forest. 

But in boreal Alaska and Canada, it’s just the opposite. The spruce-dominated forests are adapted to high-intensity fires that only return every hundred or so years. As climate change speeds up the return of fires with hotter and drier conditions, boreal forests have begun to suffer major losses. 

“The frequency of boreal fires, ultimately, is increasing. In many places we’re seeing more reburning and larger burned areas,” says Dr. Rogers. “Climate change and human actions are shifting that fire regime out of its historical range into this new realm. So the whole idea of fire suppression in the boreal is to keep fires closer to historical levels, to which the systems and fauna are adapted. Suppression can help delay permafrost degradation, limiting carbon emissions and buying us time to reach our climate targets.” 

Past missteps with fire suppression have made fire managers cautious, though. Lisa Saperstein, Regional Fire Ecologist with U.S. Fish and Wildlife, notes that, with limited resources, priorities in intense fire seasons will have to shift to protecting human settlements over carbon and permafrost. But, given the co-benefits of keeping fire activity to historic levels—and the urgency of reigning in emissions in any way we can—managers in Yukon Flats were willing to try.

“This type of shift in values is always difficult, especially when the outcome is uncertain. Support from leaders of fire management organizations, in addition to land managers, has been a key factor in this effort moving forward,” says Saperstein. 

If a fire starts in the woods, how do you fight it?

This change in tactics won’t mean that every fire that ignites will be put out—both impractical and unhelpful from an ecological perspective—but it will mean more aggressively targeting fires when they arise. Since the 1980s, when fire was detected in Yukon Flats, it would be monitored by the Alaska Fire Service, but not suppressed, except when presenting a threat to human communities.

“This pilot project is a new twist to a long-standing partnership between the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and Alaska Fire Service. For select areas of the Refuge, now if a fire start is detected, we ask the Alaska Fire Service to only send a crew if they are confident in 100% containment within three days,” says Yukon Flats Refuge Manager, Jimmy Fox.

The suppression teams will target fires that they judge as “quick fixes”, curbing the potential for them to grow into large, stand-replacing sized blazes. If a fire becomes too big to fight quickly, the teams revert to the old tactic of simply monitoring.

“If a crew is deployed, we ask that they cease suppression and return to base after three days, regardless of containment status,” says Fox. “This request is grounded in concern for the Alaska Fire Service having resources available if communities become threatened from other fires.”

Fox says refuge management and Alaska Fire Service members will stay flexible as the pilot project unfolds so they can respond to changing conditions.

“In conservation, we tend to focus on the technical aspects of a challenge and avoid the difficulties that come with asking ourselves to adapt,” says Fox. “This pilot project is both adaptive and technical. It has required me to stay curious and listen. It has required me to learn new information, and share it in a way that is comprehensible. It’s required being comfortable with uncertainty, and yet standing in purpose. It has been a learning journey so far, and will continue to be.”

Putting models to the test

On the research side, the team at Woodwell Climate hopes this new strategy will present an opportunity to study the practical implementation of fire suppression as a climate solution.

“This is the proof of concept,” says Dr. Frumhoff. “This is the opportunity to really see in a rigorous way whether we can apply this solution at a meaningful scale and gain meaningful carbon benefits with relatively modest cost. And it’s directly traceable to the conversations that the research team had with fire managers.”

The 1.6 million acres slated for fire suppression are small compared to the 8.6 million that comprise the entire refuge, or the 5.6 billion acres of permafrost in the northern hemisphere, but it’s a very important start. Research and analysis of the effectiveness of this solution could aid its expansion to other regions of the Arctic.

“It’s a big moment, because, while it’s obviously a relatively small area compared to all of Alaska, 1.6 million acres is still a lot of land,” says Dr. Rogers. “We’re hoping that it’s a jumping off point and can translate to other refuges and other agencies with the addition of proper funding and staffing.”

And each summer, the case for protecting permafrost and boreal carbon, while working to  dramatically reduce emissions from fossil fuels, continues to grow. 

“Every year that goes by, as fires intensify and climate change gets worse, this message might resonate just a little more, ” says Dr. Rogers. “Because it’s a problem that’s not going away if we do nothing about it. And we can do something about it.”

It was supposed to be a quiet season, but only two months into summer and Alaska is already on track for another record-setting wildfire season. With 3 million acres already scorched and over 260 active fires, 2022 is settling in behind 2015 and 2004 so far as one of the state’s worst fire seasons on record. Here’s what to know about Alaska’s summer fires:

2. Historic fires are Burning in Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta and Bristol Bay

Southwestern Alaska, in particular, has been suffering. The season kicked off with an unseasonably early fire near Kwethluk that started in April. Currently, the East Fork Fire, which is burning near the Yup’ik village of St. Mary’s, AK, is among the biggest tundra fires in Alaska’s history. Just above Bristol Bay, the Lime Complex— consisting of 18 individual fires— has burned through nearly 865,000 acres. One of the longest lasting fires in the Lime Complex, the Upper Talarik fire, is burning close to the site of the controversial open-pit Pebble Mine.

2. Seasonal predictions showed a low-fire season

For Dr. Brendan Rogers, who was in Fairbanks, AK for a research trip in May, the explosive start of the fire season contrasts strongly to conditions he saw in late spring.

“It was a relatively average spring in interior Alaska, with higher-than-normal snowpack. Walking around the forest was challenging because of remaining snow, slush, and flooded trails,” said Dr. Rogers.

Early predictions showed a 2022 season low in fire due to heavy winter snow. But the weather shifted in the last ten days of May and early June. June temperatures in Anchorage were the second highest ever recorded. High heat and low humidity rapidly dried out vegetation and groundcover, creating a tinderbox of available fuel. This sudden flip from wet to dry unfolded similarly to conditions in 2004, which resulted in the state’s worst fire season on record.

3. Climate Change is accelerating fire feedback loops

The conditions for this wildfire season were facilitated by climate change, and the emissions that result from them will fuel further warming. The hot temperatures responsible for drying out the Alaskan landscape were brought on by a persistent high pressure system that prevents the formation of clouds— a weather pattern linked to warming-related fluctuations in the jet stream. 

“With climate change, we tend to get more of these persistent ridges and troughs in the jet stream,” says Dr. Rogers. “This will cause a high pressure system like this one to just sit over an area. There is no rain; it dries everything out, warms everything up.” 

The compounding effects of earlier snowmelt and declining precipitation have also made it easier for ground cover to dry out rapidly under a spell of hot weather. More frequent fires also burn through ground cover protecting permafrost, accelerating thaw that releases more carbon. According to the Alaska Center for Climate Assessment and Policy, the frequency of big fire seasons like this one are only increasing— a trend expected to continue apace with further climate change.

Additionally, this summer has been high in lightning strikes, which were linked to the ignition of most of the fires currently burning in Alaska. Higher temperatures result in more energy in the atmosphere, which increases the likelihood of lightning strikes. On just one day in July over 7,180 lightning strikes were reported in Alaska and neighboring portions of Canada.

4. Communities are Being Affected Hundreds of Miles Away

The destruction from these wildfires has forced rural and city residents alike to evacuate and escape the path of burning. Some residents of St. Mary’s, AK have elected to stay long enough to help combat the fires, clearing brush around structures and cutting trees that could spread fire to town buildings if they alight. 

But the impact of the fires is also being felt in towns not in the direct path of the flames. Smoke particulates at levels high enough to cause dangerously unhealthy air quality were carried as far north as Nome, AK on the Seward Peninsula.

“Even though a lot of these fires are remote, that doesn’t preclude direct human harm,” says Woodwell senior science policy advisor Dr. Peter Frumhoff.

Recent research has shown that combatting boreal forest fires, even remote ones, can be a cost effective way to prevent both these immediate health risks, as well as the dangers of ground subsidence, erosion, and loss of traditional ways of life posed by climate change in the region. 

5. The season is not over yet

Mid-July rains have begun to slow the progression of active fires but, according to Dr. Frumhoff, despite the lull, it is important to keep in mind that the season is not over yet.

“The uncertainty of those early predictions also applies to the remainder of the fire season — we don’t know how much more fire we’ll see in Alaska over the next several weeks.”