The Climate Crisis has been an extremely relevant issue for the past 30 years. While climate change has been occurring for thousands of years, with the constant alterations of Earth's climate, climate change has only been considered an issue in the United States since 1988. Deforestation and the impacts of Modern Slavery have been major contributors to climate change and these issues cause concern for what can be done to fix or stop the damage being done to the environment.
Deforestation has led to a loss of habitat for animals, drier and hotter climates, and many other issues that have a bad impact on the environment and Modern slavery helps drive deforestation due to unfair labor practices in places like the Amazon that are linked with massive amounts of deforestation.
Impact of Deforestation on the Environment
Along with factories and fisheries, deforestation is one of the more common forms of modern slavery labor. Brazil is the home to the Amazon rainforest and there has been deforestation taking place there for years. Deforestation and global warming in the Amazon are causing heat stress conditions, which are becoming more common in all tropical regions of the world (Fatima et al., 2021). While the increases heat stress conditions are happening due to global warming, scientists believe that deforestation is only going to speed up this process and magnify the risk of these conditions, which can be harmful for wildlife and will be physically intolerable for the human body (Fatima et al.,2021). Converting the forests to croplands causes a decrease in near surface relative humidity, helping lead to these hotter and drier conditions due to the lack of moisture (Jiang et al., 2021).
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| Deforestation in the Amazon (Adapted from npr.org) |
The reduction of carbon storage in the tropical forests because of deforestation is also a factor in producing hotter climates. The Amazon is one of Earth’s largest carbon sinks and deforestation reduces its capacity to act as a carbon sink (Gatti et al., 2021). Deforestation and the climate change caused by it, contribute to the loss of carbon in the tropical forests on Earth, making it more difficult for the Earth's climate to be stable (Li et al.,2022). One of the largest consequences of this is precipitation reduction, which causes a hotter and drier climate in tropical forests that are not used to this climate, ultimately causing harmful changes to the environment.
Forest fires are another issue that are more likely to occur with deforestation. With deforestation comes slash-and-burn, a method to clear land in forests for agricultural use (dos Reis et al., 2021). Slash-and-burn can serve as the main form of ignition and with that and a mix of a dry climate, there is a higher risk for a forest fire. In the Amazon, a severe drought event, often referred to as El Nino, can create the perfect scenario for a forest fire and since deforestation leads to a drier and warmer climate, the Amazon will be at greater risk for forest fires, which will have a severe impact on the environment and the people that live in the area. During the dry season this phenomenon is more common in deforested areas as they produce significantly low amounts of rainfall compared to areas without deforestation (Mu & Jones, 2022).
The Impacts of Amazon deforestation have an effect on public health and infectious diseases. Changes in temperature and precipitation caused by deforestation can allow for weather that favors pathogens survival and reproduction as well as their ability to infect human and animal hosts. For example, if temperature increases, mosquitoes could have a more favorable condition which could help them to spread disease (Ellwanger et al., 2020). Deforestation will also impact forest dependent communities. Deforestation effects communities on the edges of the rainforest as they depend on the trees and plants in the Amazon and deforestation will eliminate many of these resources for the communities (Brandao et al., 2022).
What is Modern Slavery?
While there is no official definition for this term as it is used in different ways, it is defined by the 2012 Bellagio-Harvard guidelines as “Constituting control over a person in such a way as to significantly derive that person of his or her individual liberty with the intent of exploitation through the use, management, purchase, sale, profit or transfer of that person”. Modern Slavery can be seen as an umbrella term to describe all forms of exploitation such as forced labor, debt bondage and human trafficking (Jackson et al., 2020; Decker Sparks et al., 2021). The evidence of connections between Modern Slavery and environmental degradation, such as deforestation, has only been increasing and becoming a bigger concern.
Brazil is just one location with extreme levels of deforestation and evidence of modern slavery. While the deforestation of the Amazon has been promoted by Brazilian government for expansive agricultural strategy, illegal deforestation activities have related to Modern Slavery (Brown et al., 2021). Unfair and forced labor practices in Brazil are often in the form of debt-bondage, and this evidence of forced labor has been related to environmentally destructive activity in the Amazon (Brown et al.,2021). The issue of Modern Slavery continues to grow all over the world and the use of these slaves for labor such as deforestation, factories and fisheries is causing great concern for environmental activists as the increase of Modern Slave use will only continue to cause even more environmental issues.
Impact of the Slavery-Environment-Climate Nexus
The environmental cost of slavery is extremely high given its large contributions to deforestation, species loss and even chemical and industrial pollution. Research estimates that 40% of deforestation is accomplished with workers subject to Modern Slavery practices. The proportion of total CO2 emissions through deforestation is estimated to be between 17% and 30% (Decker Sparks et al., 2021). With these rates, hypothetically speaking, if these modern slaves were to be a country, they would have a population of over 40 million people and would be the third largest emitter of CO2, at 2.54 billion tons a year, only behind China and the United States for the largest emission of CO2 (Fig. 1). Meaning that not only is this destroying the environment, but it has a large impact on climate change. As well as this, Modern Slavery labor many times includes the use of toxic material and hazardous working conditions that can accelerate environmental damage.
Figure 1: Comparison of emissions from top countries in the world, from Bales & Sovacool, 2021
There is also a direct correlation between places where there is more risk for environmental change and places with more risk of modern slavery (Fig. 2). This relationship deems modern slavery to be a threat multiplier to climate change, since it only increases issues that lead to climate change. Suggestion that not only is modern slavery a threat multiplier to climate change, but climate change is also a threat multiplier to modern slavery (Bales & Sovacool, 2021). Up until recent years, the link between modern slavery and climate change were not acknowledged as a joint issue, but rather one as a human rights issue and one as an environmental issue. But
now a more distinct link between the two issues has been proven.
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| Figure 2: Relationship between Modern Slaery Index and Climate Change Vulnerability Index, from Bales & Sovacool, 2021 |
Conclusion
Modern Slavery and deforestation have caused significant and threatening climate impacts in the Amazon rainforest. These issues have been occurring for years but most recently researchers have taken more notice of them. Modern Slavery is a deeper issue than discussed is this piece of writing and is often a forgotten factor of climate change. While it has a large-scale impact on climate change, there is going to have to be a lot of work done to solve this issue due to its significant social and ethical impact. Deforestation, however, could be stopped or at the very least slowed down to help minimize impacts on the environment. The long-lasting impacts of these issues may still be unknown, but with the research and developments we currently have, it looks as though they will leave their mark on the climate, and we can only hope that there is a possible solution to reverse these effects for the sake of the Amazon.
References:
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