Amazon Tipping Point Postponed: Ecoregion Assemblies for a Living Planet

"In Climate News, Catastrophic Tipping Point is Postponed by Ten Years."

Ramon H. Nogales, for Rolling Stone News

3 March, 2050

Last Thursday, the United Nations Earth System Council meeting in Nairobi announced that the Amazon earth system tipping point has been successfully postponed by a decade. We can all agree this is great news for the Earth, in contrast to recent scientific reports of the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC) becoming more unstable. Global heating has been hovering just below two degrees for five years, and acrimonious debate continues in the Council about the European Union’s Global Cooling Initiative. 

Does this mean the Earth has turned the climate corner, and how was the result achieved? We spoke with Ronin Biri, who has been Secretary-General of the Amazon Ecoregion Assembly since 2048.

Rolling Stone: Good morning, Secretary-General Biri. Can you explain why this achievement matters? How was it done, and can we breathe a sigh of relief?

Ronin Biri: It involved a lot of fighting and struggle. For decades, Indigenous Amazonian peoples and their international supporters fought ranchers, oil drillers, mining companies, and security forces to defend their land and forests. Their lands were plundered, polluted, torn open. Governments took bribes, and sent their police and armies to murder and harass the defenders of the forest. They staged blockades, fought insurgencies, and brought lawsuits. 

This war pushed the Amazon close to the tipping point that would cause its tropical ecosystem to collapse and degrade into savanna. After 2001, 9% of its forest was lost, and scientists say that the tipping point lies between 20–25% forest loss or 2–2.5°C of global heating. By the beginning of the 2020s, the eastern Amazon had stopped being a carbon sink for the planet; by 2025, 18% of the Amazon’s forests had been cleared. It was a truly perilous moment.

That same year, the Brazilian parliament passed the “devastation bill,” which would have crippled the environmental approvals process for development in the Amazon and ended the reprieve from deforestation that Lula’s government brought. Lula rejected 15% of the bill, but allowed the government to create expedited licenses for projects designated as “strategic.”  It took another five-year campaign to roll back the changes. It was a recipe for another decade of war and would have destroyed our planet.

Tipping points are worrying because they cascade into other changes across the Earth. If the Amazon dies back, it will release 250 billion tons of CO2  into the atmosphere and destroy an enormous carbon sink. That means even more ice loss, more heating, more droughts, worse hurricanes, and more conflict, until things run completely out of control. Hundreds of thousands of species would be lost, accelerating the sixth mass extinction. Our Indigenous worlds would suffer, and we have suffered enough.

Sadly, the earth passed the tipping points for coral reefs and the Greenland ice sheet in the 2030s. But we can celebrate today. We have postponed the third and most dangerous tipping point. 

Rolling Stone: Many people don’t know that history now. It sounds like a very bad time. What changed?

Ronin Biri: Winding back the devastation bill was the first thing, and that took too long. 

The second was Indigenous communities and many civil society orgs pushed for a binding international treaty to end deforestation. That proposal started in Brazil with the Plataforma CIPÓ institute. It took less than five years and was negotiated in the General Assembly in 2030. Within ten years, loss of primary and established forest dropped to virtually zero everywhere but active conflict zones. 

After that, states took the momentum into a coal elimination treaty, which was signed in 2032. Next month, states are meeting in Geneva to include oil and progress to a full fossil fuel treaty; we have a lot of hope for that. These treaties, plus the global methane agreement, have helped stabilise global heating at 1.9°C—for now. 

The third big catalyst was the establishment of the Andes-Amazon-Atlantic Ecological and Sociocultural Corridor (Triple-A) initiative in 2029. It stretches for 2.7 million km2, from Ecuador and Peru in the west, across Colombia, northern Brazil and Venezuela, to Guyana, Suriname, French Guiana, and Brazil in the east—spanning 222 protected areas and 2,003 Indigenous territories. Amazonian peoples call it “the path of the Anacondas,” because of their origin story that humanity was born in the Atlantic mouth of the Amazon and travelled west in the form of anacondas along the Amazon River and its tributaries, distributing life and giving each human group its territory and principles to live with the land.

This initiative stood like a wall against the resumption of unsustainable logging and the disrespect for Indigenous lands and peoples. They didn’t want it to be a distant, bureaucratic organisation like the EU that had no connection to land. They wanted it to help develop sustainable business, local initiatives, and cooperation across the region. 

The Path of the Anacondas was also the inspiration for the fifteen Ecoregion Assemblies that the United Nations established between 2035 and 2040. They were transnational assemblies charged with protecting nature and Indigenous rights across their biomes, which were set up for the Amazon, the Arctic and Antarctic, the South Pacific and Australia, Europe, southern Africa, and more. They have proven crucial to keeping the Earth system stable through the dangers of the last decade.

Rolling Stone: What was special about the Path of the Anacondas initiative?

Ronin Biri: The AAA Initiative was a new kind of transnational governance that respected Indigenous sovereignty, was more democratic, and involved national states and lower jurisdictions too. Corporate and extractive interests had corrupted national states with bad election laws; the design diluted their influence and gave back power to communities. 

As well as being Indigenous-led, the Triple-A initiative had a fundamental objective to protect the Amazon’s ecology and beings. It was an example of what philosophers call an “Ecology Politic”—a form of democracy and government devoted to protecting the Earth and its people.

A historian recently wrote that the Paris Agreement on Climate Change was the worst treaty since Versailles. It was one key reason why the climate emergency worsened after the 2010s. And the biodiversity convention didn’t stop the plunder of the Amazon. Why should we trust international law and fancy international meetings? 

Ronin Biri: Your skepticism is well-founded. The international customary law doctrine of permanent state sovereignty over natural resources, which underpinned the invasion and exploitation of the Amazon, was only abolished in 2031. Indigenous people have long been suspicious of international law as just another tool of colonisation. But they decided to become experts and push their points of view. 

They realized that the Paris Agreement was a waste of time because big powers, who were too close to the fossil fuel industry, insisted on a consensus voting rule and kept trying to keep it weak. The massacre of climate protesters at COP36 in Jakarta was another demoralizing blow. And people had stopped thinking about forests! Forests were crucial for justice for Amazonian peoples and the future of our planet, but they barely got discussed there. The Glasgow Leaders Declaration on Forests and Land Use became a museum exhibit.

International law is part of the power structure in global society, and for too long it was part of the colonization structure. Colonization happened not just through violence and theft, but through bureaucracy, too. We must be aware of how international law upholds or challenges power, and how the design of agreements and processes plays a role. In alliance with the Pacific and climate vulnerable countries, Amazonian peoples chose to build treaties through the General Assembly because it only has a two-thirds voting rule to adopt a new treaty. They kept pushing for the rights and representation of nature and made opposition to consensus voting rules a cause celébre. 

The ecoregion assemblies have a constitutional objective of protecting regional ecosystems and ecological security, and they include a large membership from Indigenous communities, proxy representatives for nature, elected community representatives, and officials from regional states. In turn, they elect delegates to the Earth System Council. This kind of transnational ecological democracy is a new experiment, but it is the way ahead. 

Rolling Stone: So, can we breathe a sigh of relief?

Ronin Biri: Yes, we can, but we must keep working and understand the urgency of our planetary situation. If we are to postpone the Amazon tipping point further than a decade, we have to increase our reafforestation efforts, bring the use of fossil fuels to zero globally, and make sure they stay there. The Earth System Council and the Security Council need to redouble their cooperation on conflict logging in the Burma-Laos corridor and the Congolese basin, to speak of just a couple of worrying conflict areas. And with the Earth hovering near nineteen other tipping points, we need to conclude a Global Greenhouse Convention and establish the International Climate Agency to secure net zero and manage the challenges to come.