Cerrado

node · earth · Central Brazil

The tropical savanna covering roughly two million square kilometres of central Brazil, immediately south and east of the Amazon, and the most species-rich savanna on Earth. It belongs in an Amazon Journey for two reasons that pull in opposite directions. It is downwind: the aerial rivers deflected south by the Andes pass over it, and its own deep-rooted vegetation recharges the aquifers that feed a majority of Brazil's hydrographic basins, so a weakened Amazon is a drier Cerrado and a cleared Cerrado is a drier southern Brazil. And it is the alternative: when the Amazon Soy Moratorium closed the Amazon biome to soy grown on newly cleared land, the frontier moved here, where no equivalent agreement existed and where the legal reserve requirement on private land is far lower. Roughly half the Cerrado's native vegetation is already gone - a higher proportion than the Amazon has lost - and it attracts a fraction of the attention. Displacement is not the same as prevention.