n the Amazon, or in the parts of the Amazon that people have

mowed down and converted into grazing pasture, the average

abattoir-bound cow has nearly three acres to himself. Nice for the
cow, perhaps, but senseless and dangerous in every other way.
Every year, on average, tropical deforestation accounts for fifteen
per cent of global greenhouse emissions. About half of the
contributing deforestation occurs in South America; deforestation
in the Amazon recently increased. If the trend continues, scientists
have found, it could lengthen the forest’s dry season, triggering
even greater warming and drying, killing trees in the nearby (still
intact) forest, and eventually causing mass tree mortality and an
entire ecosystem shift—from rainforest to savannah. The tipping
point for such a collapse in the Amazon is between twenty and
twenty-five per cent deforestation—fifteen to seventeen per cent
is already gone. “If you exceed the threshold,” Carlos Nobre, a
Brazilian climate and tropical-forest expert, told me, “fifty to
sixty per cent of the forest could be gone over three to five
decades.”

An urgent new report from the United Nations’ Intergovernmental

Panel on Climate Change (I.P.C.C.), published this morning in
Geneva, Switzerland, highlights “what has been true all along,”
Deborah Lawrence, an environmental-sciences professor and
tropical-ecosystem expert at the University of Virginia, said. “We
cannot make our climate goals without stopping deforestation and
better managing agriculture.” In the past, I.P.C.C. reports
focussed on what various energy futures would mean for the
atmosphere. How much might we reduce the use of fossil fuels,
by when, and what might that look like for all of earth’s systems?
In this case, however, the panel focussed exclusively on land—
and specifically on how people’s unsustainable use of land is
dramatically contributing to climate change. According to the
report’s findings, land use is responsible for twenty-three per cent
of global greenhouse-gas emissions—half from carbon dioxide
emitted through deforestation, half from agriculture. (If pre- and
post-production activities in the global food system are included,
the emissions are estimated to account for as much as thirty-seven
per cent of total human-caused greenhouse-gas emissions.) In
turn, climate change is hastening land degradation, destabilizing
the food supply, and harming the livelihoods of hundreds of
millions of people. “Climate change creates additional stresses on
land, exacerbating existing risks to livelihoods, biodiversity,
human and ecosystem health, infrastructure, and food systems,”
the report’s summary for policymakers states. “Some regions will
face higher risks, while some regions will face risks previously
not anticipated.”
n a mansion built by the heir of an oil tycoon on New York’s
Upper East Side, a group of financiers, philanthropists, and
corporate executives recently gathered to discuss the climate
crisis. The occasion was a new report, co-authored by an unlikely
combination of McKinsey consultants and scientists from the
Woods Hole Research Center (W.H.R.C.), on how physical
climate risks will affect socioeconomic systems in the next few
decades. During a presentation on the report’s findings, much of it
in the preening language of fixed assets, liability risk, and flow
charts, Spencer Glendon, an economist and senior fellow at
W.H.R.C., was especially blunt with the crowd. He said that he
tells decision-makers things such as “ ‘You know how many
people in India are going to die from this, if you do nothing?
Ignoring that now is on you.’ ” If investors and business leaders
don’t account for these risks, “that will be unforgivable,” he said.
“Because everyone knew they were coming.”

Glendon had spent the majority of his career working in finance,

but he makes a point to stand out slightly, with spiky gray hair, a
yellow plaid bow tie, and rectangular brown-and-red glasses. He
grew up outside Detroit, in the nineteen-seventies, where he
became “familiar at a very young age with things going badly,”
he told me. “I became fascinated by the question: Why does that
happen in some places and not in others?” Early in his career, he
moved back and forth between places that worked well and places
that worked poorly: he was an engineer in an auto factory in
Detroit and a banker on the South Side of Chicago before moving
to a small-business lending program in Russia; then he got a
Ph.D. in economic history at Harvard. He joined the investment
firm Wellington Management in the late nineties, first as a
researcher trying to understand what might become of Asia after
the financial crisis. He eventually became a partner. Seven years
ago, he started asking questions about climate change.
When the coronavirus struck an indigenous community in the
Ecuadorian Amazon, in April, the initial victims of the disease
died without ever being tested. The government’s response to this
outbreak in the Secoya nation was sluggish—the first test results
appeared two weeks after the first death. The Secoya tribal
president, Justino Piaguaje, accused the government of
abandoning them to their fate in remote communities, surrounded
by oil fields and palm plantations. The tribe had just seven
hundred members in Ecuador, so the death of an elder meant, in
addition to the personal loss of a loved one, the disappearance of
language, history, and cultural knowledge. Jimmy Piaguaje, a
filmmaker and the cousin of Justino (all Secoya have the last
name Piaguaje or Payaguaje), lost an uncle and a grandfather to
the disease. He said, “We were afraid that we would go extinct.”

During the peak of the outbreak, when the morgues of Ecuador’s

largest city, Guayaquil, were overflowing—and while indigenous
communities attempted to quarantine—the oil, mining, and
forestry industries continued to work in the rain forest. In May,
Ecuador’s coalition of indigenous governments, CONFENIAE,
launched an online dashboard to track cases of the disease in
indigenous communities and identify outbreaks so that medical
brigades, PCR tests, and emergency kits could be directed to the
places that needed them. As of November, the dashboard had
logged more than three thousand cases in ten indigenous nations.
Carlos Mazabanda, Amazon Watch’s field coördinator for
Ecuador, who worked on creating the dashboard, said, “In the
absence of a response from the government, indigenous peoples
were forced to take matters into their own hands.”
n 2019, more than a hundred thousand people walked into the
Pierre, the five-star hotel on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan. Some
checked in at the front desk; others, in ball gowns and tuxedos,
headed up the stairs to the Grand Ballroom. About five hundred
events were held at the Pierre that year: weddings, galas,
corporate parties, bar mitzvahs. In December, there were holiday
parties every night. Such events could run to four hundred and
fifty dollars a guest for food, drinks, and staff—and then there
were the ice sculptures and custom-made dance floors that clients
ordered from outside venders. At the Pierre, events were a forty-
million-dollar-a-year business, accounting for half the hotel’s
revenue.

About eighty weddings took place at the Pierre in 2019. A certain

subset of wealthy New Yorkers have attended numerous events at
the hotel, and couples who’ve been married there have tried to
transform the Grand Ballroom in ways that guaranteed that their
wedding would not be forgotten. Sometimes, floral decorators
have used netting to suspend thousands of flowers from the
ceiling, so that guests felt as though they were standing beneath a
garden. One decorator adorned the room with ten thousand
peonies. There have been quite a few weddings with a winter-
wonderland theme—at one, decorators used drapery to create the
illusion of icicles hanging from above, rolled out a white carpet,
and set up a snow machine. Jay Laut, a banquet captain at the
Pierre, told me, “Sometimes we would just talk among ourselves
and say, ‘Oh, my God, what a party they had!’ ”