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Amazon Rainforest Nearing a Tipping Point, Researchers Warn

The collapse of the Amazon rainforest’s ecosystem, home to a tenth of Earth’s land species, could collapse much more quickly than earlier estimated, according to an international team of prominent researchers including UCLA’s Susanna Hecht. Their peer-reviewed paper, the first major study to focus on the cumulative effects of a range of variables including temperature, drought, deforestation and legal protections, appeared in the journal Nature and has been covered by news outlets including the New York Times, Washington Post, CNN, BBC and the Guardian. A forest-wide collapse is “happening much faster than we thought, and in multiple ways,” the researchers said. The study called on governments to halt carbon emissions and deforestation and restore at least 5% of the rainforest. Hecht, professor at UCLA Luskin Urban Planning and the UCLA Institute of the Environment and Sustainability, is director of the university’s Center for Brazilian Studies.


 

Hecht Honored by American Association of Geographers

Susanna Hecht, professor of urban planning and director of the UCLA Center for Brazilian Studies, received the Stanley Brunn Award for Creativity in Geography from the American Association of Geographers in Denver on March 24. The award is given annually to an individual geographer or team that has demonstrated originality, creativity and significant intellectual breakthroughs in geography. Hecht, who also has an appointment at the UCLA Institute of the Environment and Sustainability, is one of the founding thinkers of political ecology. She has published research on anthropogenic soils, agroforestry and the land management practices of indigenous and Afrodescendant peoples in Brazil; how cattle farming, soy production and mining in the rainforest drive unsustainable land use, deforestation and climate change; and how forests have been shaped by human engagement throughout history. Hecht’s publications include “Fate of the Forest: Destroyers and Defenders of the Amazon,” co-authored with Alexander Cockburn, and “Scramble for the Amazon and the Lost Paradise of Euclides da Cunha,” which won the Melville Prize for best book in Latin American environmental history, awarded by the Conference in Latin American History, in 2014. She also co-edited “The Social Life of Forests: The Past, Present and Futures of Wooded Landscapes.” Hecht has been actively involved in social movements in Amazonia, including the Forest Peoples Alliance in Brazil, and is a member of the Science Panel for the Amazon.

Read a Q&A with Hecht about the state of the Amazon rainforest on the UCLA Latin American Institute website.


 

Hecht on 50 Years of Engagement with Amazonia

Susanna Hecht, professor of urban planning at UCLA Luskin and director of the UCLA Center for Brazilian Studies, was a recent guest on the 74 Podcast series “Urban Nature.” Hecht, who holds appointments in geography and UCLA’s Institute of the Environment and Sustainability, discussed her five decades of research and engagement with the Amazon as well as changes in the region over the past century. Topics of the program, recorded in July, included the ideological view of the Amazon as a frontier. “It was not actually ever a frontier,” said Hecht, arguing “that ideology of frontier is the ideology of conquest. It doesn’t reflect a reality.” Hecht, an authority on forest transitions and sustainable agriculture, as well as a founding thinker in the field of political ecology, described the Amazon as a “major center of civilizations … a major area with large-scale urban structures with linkages between those structures,” as opposed to a void that is subject to what she calls a “development tsunami.”