Biomes Breathe With Us

When Water, Carbon, Money, and Life Need to Become Part of the Same Economy Again

Pause for a few seconds and notice where your body is.

Is it hot?

Dry?

Humid?

Is there wind?

Did it rain this week?

Which watershed did the water you drink come from?

Perhaps we do not know how to answer.

But our body lives the consequences.

In the previous blog, we saw that life has never truly been separate from territory. Organisms modify the environment, and the modified environment changes the possibilities available to the generations that follow.

Now we can widen the lens again.

In Brazil, we call these large territorial organizations the Amazon, Cerrado, Caatinga, Atlantic Forest, Pantanal, and Pampa.

They are not six colored shapes on a map.

They are six different ways in which water, heat, soil, carbon, plants, animals, microorganisms, and human beings continue composing possibilities for life.

When we say that “biomes breathe with us,” it is a metaphor.

Biomes do not have lungs.

But they participate in the cycles that make our lungs possible.

Every Biome Has Its Own Rhythm

Perhaps one common mistake is to imagine conservation as keeping nature frozen like a photograph.

A living biome does not remain still.

The Pantanal depends on the movement between flood and drought.

The Cerrado passes through clearly marked wet and dry seasons.

The Caatinga has developed extraordinary strategies for enduring long periods of little water and responding rapidly when rain returns.

The Pampa has grasslands whose diversity depends on relationships among climate, soil, herbivory, and disturbance regimes.

The Atlantic Forest contains enormous variations in altitude, rainfall, and temperature.

The Amazon moves gigantic amounts of water between soil, vegetation, and atmosphere.

The problem is not change itself.

The problem begins when we alter the intensity, duration, or frequency of these cycles so much that the system loses its ability to return.

This is where so-called tipping points appear.

But we need to avoid oversimplification.

There is no single scientifically established number today saying: “from this point onward, each of Brazil’s six biomes will no longer return.”

In the Amazon, the evidence is particularly concerning. A study led by Brazilian researcher Bernardo Flores and published in Nature in 2024 estimated that, by 2050, between 10% and 47% of Amazonian forests may be exposed to combined disturbances capable of producing unexpected ecosystem transitions. Deforestation, warming, drought, fire, and reduced rainfall can reinforce one another. (nature.com)

For the other biomes, it may currently be more accurate to speak of loss of resilience, local thresholds, and regime shifts.

In the Pantanal, for example, repeatedly disrupting the annual flood pulse while combining extreme drought, heat, and fire alters the system’s own dynamics. Studies of the 2024 fires show how the absence of flooding, rainfall deficits, heat waves, and accumulated fuel combined to amplify risk. (rmets.onlinelibrary.wiley.com)

In the Caatinga, desertification and inappropriate land use do not simply mean that “the desert has arrived.” There are deeply degraded areas that still retain a capacity for regeneration, reminding us that recognizing a threshold also means recognizing how much can still be recovered before we give up on the territory. (sciencedirect.com)

In the Cerrado, the problem appears strongly through water. The biome is an important recharge area for major aquifers and river systems, but it is becoming hotter and drier, with longer and more intense dry seasons. (nature.com)

In the Atlantic Forest, the critical signal may not be one dramatic turning point, but thousands of small separations. A 2024 analysis found 97% of vegetation fragments to be smaller than 50 hectares, with a large share of vegetation located close to edges. A forest may still appear green in a satellite image while losing ecological connectivity. (sciencedirect.com)

In the Pampa, converting native grasslands into intensive agriculture or forestry alters biodiversity, sediment dynamics, and soil carbon stocks. Once again, the question is not only how much green remains, but what kind of system is still functioning within that green. (scielo.br)

Producing Excess Can Mean Producing Less Future

In 2025, Brazil reduced deforestation across all biomes.

That matters.

The total area fell 20.6% compared with 2024 and dropped below one million hectares for the first time in the MapBiomas Alerta historical series.

But we still lost 984,794 hectares of native vegetation in a single year.

The Cerrado alone accounted for approximately 55% of this loss. The Amazon and Cerrado together concentrated more than 84%. Over the previous seven years, agriculture and livestock were associated with more than 99% of the native vegetation loss identified in the report. (alerta.mapbiomas.org)

This allows us to recover a question we have already asked at BrainLatam:

produce more until when?

Producing food is necessary.

Producing energy is necessary.

Producing housing is necessary.

But a living system has limits.

If we produce something in excess to the point that we reduce water, soil fertility, biodiversity, climate stability, and future productive capacity, part of what appears as economic wealth may actually be financed by the destruction of ecological wealth that GDP barely sees. (brainlatam.com)

Perhaps Every Territory Needs Different Rules

If each biome has different cycles, excesses, and needs, why imagine that every territorial policy should arise only from one uniform rule designed far away from the place itself?

This does not mean eliminating the national State.

It means making the State more capable of physiologically listening to the territory.

The Pantanal could prioritize indicators linked to flooding, fire, and hydrological connectivity.

The Caatinga, water, soil, desertification, and regeneration adapted to the semiarid region.

The Cerrado, groundwater recharge, native vegetation, and the duration of the dry season.

The Pampa, the integrity of native grasslands.

The Atlantic Forest, connectivity among fragments.

The Amazon, recycled humidity, mature forest, fire, and territorial continuity.

Recent science supports the importance of this situated governance. Indigenous Lands and Conservation Units in the Amazon-Cerrado ecotone show higher evapotranspiration, lower surface temperatures, and greater climate stability than more heavily converted multiple-use areas. (sciencedirect.com)

In the Amazon, community-based management systems also show that locally organized protection can produce effects beyond the relatively small area being directly managed. (nature.com)

This comes close to Tekoha.

Not in the sense of transforming Tekoha into an administrative tool.

But as a reminder:

a territorial rule works better when it can perceive the way of life that the territory is capable of sustaining.

But Who Pays for Maintaining What Everyone Uses?

Here we encounter an economic strangeness.

A tree that is cut down quickly becomes:

timber,

transport,

an invoice,

a wage,

a tax,

GDP.

A tree left standing continues participating in:

water,

humidity,

carbon,

soil,

temperature,

biodiversity.

But much of this does not enter monetary accounts in the same way.

This is the problem we have already explored in The Island of 1000 and later in Citizen Drex: money is an extraordinary human technology for coordination, but we can end up confusing the paper that represents value with what makes value physically possible. (brainlatam.com)

An island can print more paper.

It cannot print more water.

This distinction takes us to the BrainLatam proposal of:

Biome Income

The hypothesis begins simply:

if maintaining the ecological conditions that sustain life produces collective value, part of that value can continuously return to the Body-Territories that help maintain those conditions. (brainlatam.com)

This would not simply mean paying per hectare of forest.

Each biome would require its own indicators.

Water.

Soil.

Vegetation.

Biodiversity.

Connectivity.

Fire.

Carbon.

Regeneration.

And also the continuity of the communities participating in that territorial metabolism.

And Where Does Drex Enter?

Brazil’s Central Bank is already developing the Drex Platform and has tested operations involving wholesale and retail forms of digital assets. In the current official design, end users do not participate directly in the pilot and retail access takes place through regulated financial intermediaries. (bcb.gov.br)

Therefore, Biome Income is not the official Drex.

It is a BrainLatam proposal asking whether a future public digital-currency infrastructure could make another monetary architecture possible.

For example:

a territory conserves or regenerates a measurable ecological function;

↓

the State validates physical indicators;

↓

new or budgeted resources reach Body-Territories and projects that sustain that function;

↓

that money circulates through food, services, science, restoration, health, education, and the local economy;

↓

the territory increases both its ecological and economic capacity.

Here we need another precision.

Creating money does not automatically create GDP.

GDP grows when real production of goods and services increases.

If new money finances restoration, monitoring, regenerative agriculture, science, sanitation, local services, and other activities that use available capacity, it may increase economic activity.

If issuance grows faster than real productive capacity, it may generate inflation.

BIS models show that certain CBDC architectures can, under specific assumptions, increase output and welfare, but the results depend deeply on monetary and fiscal design. (bis.org)

Therefore, Biome Income would require:

issuance limits, auditable ecological indicators, inflation monitoring, local productive capacity, public transparency, and continuous adjustment.

This too is Jiwasa.

There is no distant authority deciding alone what is good.

Nor does each individual decide alone.

territory + community + science + State read the signals together and adjust the movement.

The Screen Can Help Return the Territory to Us

Satellites, sensors, drones, and AI can measure deforestation, fire, humidity, temperature, water, and regeneration almost in real time.

The same screen that can distance us from territory can also help us perceive it.

Perhaps this is the important question.

When we open our phone in the morning, we see what happened to celebrities, markets, and characters on the other side of the world.

But do we know:

how much it rained in our biome?

how the river is doing?

what the soil moisture is?

how much has regenerated?

which threshold we are approaching?

Perhaps a truly intelligent technology is not one that keeps us looking at the screen.

Perhaps it is one that is capable of saying:

look again at the place where your body is.

Because the biome is not outside us.

Its water circulates in our blood.

Its carbon participates in our cells.

Our food came from some soil.

And the air now entering our lungs will be precisely the next step in this series.

In the next blog, we will reduce the scale again.

From the entire biome to a single inhalation.

To ask:

when air enters you, where does the territory end and the body begin?

Main References

FLORES, B. M. et al. (2024). Critical transitions in the Amazon forest system. Nature. (nature.com)

VANCINE, M. H. et al. (2024). The Atlantic Forest of South America: Spatiotemporal dynamics of the vegetation and implications for conservation. Biological Conservation. (sciencedirect.com)

SERRÃO, E. A. O. et al. (2025). The effects of teleconnections on water and carbon fluxes in the two South America’s largest biomes. Scientific Reports. (nature.com)

HOFMANN, G. S. et al. (2025). Climate Change in the Brazilian Cerrado: A Looming Threat to Terrestrial Biodiversity. WIREs Climate Change. (doi.org)

BELEM, L. B. C. et al. (2026). Dry-Hot Compound Events Driving the 2024 Pantanal Wildfires. International Journal of Climatology. (rmets.onlinelibrary.wiley.com)

RAMON, R. et al. (2024). Conversion of native grasslands into croplands in the Pampa biome and its effects on suspended sediment. Land Degradation & Development. (doi.org)

MAPBIOMAS (2026). Annual Report on Deforestation in Brazil 2025. (rad.ia.mapbiomas.org)

WEST, T. A. P. (2024). Formal designation of Brazilian indigenous lands linked to small but consistent reductions in deforestation. Ecological Economics. (sciencedirect.com)

CAMPOS-SILVA, J. V. et al. (2025). Community-based management expands ecosystem protection footprint in Amazonian forests. Nature Sustainability. (nature.com)

CENTRAL BANK OF BRAZIL (2026). Drex – Digital Real; Drex Pilot. (bcb.gov.br)

SOKOL, A.; KUMHOF, M.; PINCHETTI, M.; RUNGCHAROENKITKUL, P. (2023). CBDC policies in open economies. BIS Working Papers. (bis.org)

BrainLatam (2026). Those Who Keep Brazil Alive Also Produce Wealth. (brainlatam.com)

BrainLatam (2026). Produce More Until When? When Excess Begins to Produce Less Future. (brainlatam.com)

BrainLatam (2026). Citizen Drex: Money as the Metabolism of Territory. (brainlatam.com)