Climate change

Amazon disaster brings whitewater race to Canada  

Unprecedented two-year drought in the massive rain forest forces cancellation of races, and brings on huge North American hurricanes

by Joseph Potvin  

Rivers and lakes have become sand and mud. Millions of fish rot in the sun. Boats are stranded. A massive fire rages out of control along Brazil's eastern coastline. Hundreds of towns receive emergency deliveries by the Brazilian Air Force, including water-purifying chemicals to counter the threat of disease.

The Amazon rain forest is drying out as the worst drought on record lingers into its second year.

It was with heavy hearts and deep concern that officials from Whitewater Canada this weekend accepted a request by the Brazilian Canoe Confederation to move the Pan-American Whitewater Slalom Canoe and Kayak Championships from Brazil to the Madawaska Kanu Center (MKC), south of Algonquin Park, Ontario, on August 19-20th.

The race was originally scheduled for September deep in the jungle on the border between Argentina and Brazil on the Itaipu Whitewater Canal, just opened in May this year on a part of the outflow from the massive Itaipu Hydroelectric Dam. As late as Sunday this week, the Brazilian Canoe Confederation's website carried a confident message that "the Itaipu reservoir provides 14 cubic meters of water per second for electricity generation. There will never be a problem to provide 12 cubic meters per second for canoeing purposes."

But in fact, the drought is so widespread that reservoirs throughout the Amazon Basin are 75 percent below capacity. On Tuesday last week, Brazil's government declared a state of emergency across all 253 towns of the region. Carlos Rittl, Greenpeace Brazil's climate campaigner, said, "This drought and its effects are really shocking. Towns are lacking food, medicines and fuel because boats cannot get through." Marcio Luiz Alves, captain of local emergency forces, said the drought is forcing many peasants to leave for urban centers because of a lack of resources.

Officials from the Brazilian Canoe Confederation met with their Canadian and American counterparts during the 2006 World Slalom Canoe and Kayak Championships in Prague, Czech Republic this weekend. That's when Whitewater Canada's High Performance Director, Sven Pinkert, called Claudia van Wijk of MKC, and Doug Corkery of the Ottawa River Runners to ask if they would consider combining the Pan American race with the upcoming 2006 Canadian National Whitewater Championships already being organized at MKC later this month.

The main logistical challenge for van Wijk and Corkery is that, with only two weeks lead time, it will be difficult for several of the South American athletes to arrange travel during peak season and at a higher cost than their expected trip to Brazil. At least four countries have to be represented to keep the race within the minimum definition of a Pan-American event, and to qualify for the awarding of World Cup points.

But everyone acknowledges that these problems are trivial in light of the big story. Scientists do not consider the Amazonian drought to be temporary or local. Scientist Carlos Nobre, of Brazil's National Institute of Space Research (INPE), said, "This drought has no parallel in the last 103 years" since the water levels began to be measured. According to Brazil's environment minister, Marina Da Silva, the drought is linked to record sea temperatures in the south-west Atlantic and Gulf of Mexico that also contributed to last year's record hurricane season. The problem is also linked to logging that has wiped out almost a fifth of the original rainforest area. In recent years, 25,000 square kilometers of Amazon forest have been cut down annually.

Recent field studies by the widely-respected Woods Hole Research Centre in the U.S. have concluded that Amazon forests cannot withstand more than two consecutive years of drought without starting to break down. The drought is now returning to the Amazon for a second successive year. As trees die, fires will increasingly sweep across the drying jungle. More exposed to the sun, the soil bakes, and large parts of the rain forest then flip permanently into a more savannah-like state. Deborah Clark from the University of Missouri, one of the world's top forest ecologists, says current research shows "the lock has broken" on the Amazon ecosystem, and the Amazon is "headed in a terrible direction".

The Amazon Basin is home to one fifth of the planet's plant and animal species, more than 200 indigenous cultures, and 30 million people. As big as the entire continental United States, the Amazon rainforest plays an absolutely critical role in the environmental processes of the Western Hemisphere. Normally the hot, wet Amazon evaporates vast amounts of water. Then the large masses of warm air rise, drawing in the trade winds from over the Atlantic. The air picks up so much moisture from the ocean that the ocean's surface water gets both cooler and saltier, then sinks and helps stir up ocean currents. But now, as the Amazon forest starts to dry out, the evaporation cycle that drives the whole process weakens, and the warming water stays on the Atlantic surface. Massive amounts of warm moist air rise directly over the ocean, and this is what fuels the hurricanes that are slamming into the Caribbean and Eastern North America.

"It's ironic that I heard about the Amazon drought because an email about a sports event" said 18 year old Sara Potvin-Bernal of Chelsea, Quebec, one of the kayak athletes looking forward to the National Championships, and now to the PanAms. "With all the war news dominating headlines right now, it seems hardly anyone has noticed that the Amazon ecosystem is in the middle of a collapse."

Joseph Potvin, vice-president for marketing at Whitewater Canada, and can be reached: jpotvin at linuxmail dot org