The deep timbre of bamboo flutes emerges from within a darkened Indigenous communal house in the Amazon rainforest, followed by dancers in body paint and musicians rhythmically stomping their feet under the scorching afternoon sun.
Variations of this scene have played out for generations in the Kalapalo people’s Tanguro village in Brazil’s Xingu Indigenous Park.
But instead of the traditional thatched roof, the communal house is covered with a white plastic tarpaulin, decorated with a brand logo and the words “for agriculture use only.”
The roof is one of many signs of increased cattle and soybean farming on the Amazon’s highly deforested Southeast fringes, the rainforest’s fastest warming region where the dry season is several weeks longer than it was a few decades ago.
A drier and more flammable rainforest means communities in the vast territory, home to 16 ethnic groups and more than 6,000 people, are having to adapt ancient farming practices to protect the land and produce enough food to sustain themselves.
They live in Mato Grosso state, Brazil’s soybean and beef heartland, surrounded by pastures and fields that underpin Brazil’s exports, but they are running low on water and need government aid to make up for poor harvests of stable food crops.
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Humans have little influence over climate. Our rains are very reliant on the oceans.
Endrigo Dalcin, councillor, Aprosoja
Streams and springs are drying up as private landowners cut down trees and convert low-productivity pastures into water-intensive soybean cropland.
For Indigenous residents and the world at large, conservation of the Amazon is crucial. The rainforest absorbs and stores large amounts of climate-warming carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and regulates rain patterns across South America and beyond.
As the Amazon is cut down, carbon is instead released into the atmosphere.
Tipping point
Scientists often say the Southeast Amazon’s high temperatures, longer dry season, deforestation and fire rates make it vulnerable to striking a “tipping point”.
Once a tipping point is reached, there is no going back - nature is pushed to a self-reinforcing downward spiral.
The forest would die back into a degraded version or even a savannah - a dry, grassland ecosystem with clusters of trees - according to a theory from Brazilian climatologist Carlos Nobre.
With deforestation and warming temperatures sapping shade and moisture, large areas of the Amazon have become more likely to burn in wildfires, according to experts.
To what extent, and exactly where, the tipping point is in the Amazon is subject to ongoing scientific debate.
Research published in 2021 by Nature found the Southeast Amazon already emits more carbon than it absorbs, indicating that more vegetation is dying than thriving.
Farmers often take a different view, distancing their actions from the changes in climate.
