Amazon: ‘Red Alert’ as precious forest threatened with collapse

The pernicious combination of climate change and deforestation has brought the Amazon close to the point of no return, a new study warns.

The alarming findings come as the world’s largest wet rainforest is hit by its worst drought on record, with the water levels of many Amazonian tributaries falling to record lows.

Without drastic measures, nearly half of the world’s largest rainforest may have been converted to grasslands or degraded ecosystems by mid-century, warns a new study in the journal Nature.

And if we reach this tipping point, the entire forest may gradually disappear, as the evaporation of water from the remaining vegetation will not be enough to sustain the rainfall that the humid ecosystem needs.

The effects would be planetary, given that the Amazon is home to 10% of the world’s biodiversity and stores large amounts of carbon, equivalent to at least a decade’s worth of anthropogenic emissions.

In other words, climate change would accelerate.

“The region is increasingly exposed to unprecedented pressures from high temperatures, extreme droughts, deforestation and fires, even in the central and isolated parts of the system,” writes the international research team.

“Once we reach the tipping point we probably won’t be able to do anything,” Bernardo Flores, an ecologist at the University of Santa Catarina in Brazil who led the study, told Reuters.

The time has come to declare a “red alert” he said.

Savanna

Previous studies looked at the potential effects of individual factors such as deforestation or global warming. The new analysis is the first to study the combination of pressures the Amazon is under.

Looking at factors such as the rate of deforestation, rainfall patterns, land management and road development, the researchers estimated that 10 to 47 percent of the Amazon is at risk of turning into savannah, or giving way to degraded forests with little tree cover , until 2050.

And indigenous communities that depend on the forest for their survival “will have nothing,” said Marina Hirota of the University of Santa Catarina.

Large tracts of jungle are burning to make way for pastures and crops (Reuters)

Last year, Brazil’s environment minister said saving the Amazon required a global mobilization similar in size to the Marshall Plan implemented after World War II.

The new study “shows how close the Amazon is to the tipping point,” commented Carlos Nobre of the University of São Paulo, who was not part of the research team.

Already, he pointed out, about 18% of the Amazon has been destroyed. If this percentage exceeds 20-25%, the jungle will give way to savannas and grasslands.

The study acknowledges that the estimates suffer from a high degree of uncertainty.

But since the stakes are global, uncertainty is no excuse for inaction, the researchers stressed.