Running Dry: the Amazon on the edge
Big Story
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52m
The Amazon river, the lifeblood of the world's largest rainforest, is drying up. Successive droughts driven by climate change have pushed water levels to historic lows, crippling the communities and ecosystems that depend on this great waterway. In the Amazonas State of Brazil, the consequences are devastating: vital trade routes are gridlocked, rural families face food insecurity, and medical access to remote villages has been cut off entirely.
Correspondent Jason Motlagh travels deep into the heart of the crisis, where entrepreneurs, scientists, riverboat captains, and Indigenous communities share stories of a region being transformed by forces beyond its control. The shrinking river threatens not only the livelihoods of millions of people living in its basin, along with cultural traditions that have thrived for centuries; life on the entire continent is in peril as the Amazon is no longer able to regulate rainfall patterns and mitigate global warming. In the words of Taisa Uruma Kambeba, a young activist portrayed in the documentary, "When the forest falls, it doesn't fall alone. What falls is the air you breathe, the rain that nourishes your land, the future your children will look for."
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