The Amazon rainforest may be approaching a tipping point which could have its biologically rich and diverse ecosystem transformed into a grassy savanna.
The fate of the rainforest is crucial to the health of the planet, because it is home to a unique variety of animal and plant life, stores a huge amount of carbon and strongly influences global weather patterns.
Scientists say about three-quarters of the rainforest is showing signs of “loss of resilience” – a reduced ability to recover from disturbances such as droughts, logging and fires. The study is based on monthly observations of satellite data from the last 20 years that map the biomass (the organic material in the area) and greenery of the forest to show how it has changed in response to fluctuating weather conditions.
This decreasing resilience since the early 2000s is a warning sign of irreversible decline, the authors said. While it is not possible to say exactly when the transition from rainforest to savanna might take place, once it becomes obvious, it would be too late to stop.
“It is worth reminding ourselves that if we reach this tipping point and commit to losing the Amazon rainforest, we will have significant feedback on global climate change,” Timothy M. Lenton, one of the authors, told a news conference. of a new study and director of the Global Systems Institute at the University of Exeter, UK.
“We lost about 90 billion tons of carbon dioxide mainly in the trees, but also in the soil (in the Amazon),” Lenton said.
If the Amazon is no longer a rainforest, it will not store as much carbon.
Previous studies based on computer simulations have reached similar conclusions about an ecological point of no return for the Amazon rainforest — but the authors said their research, published in Nature Climate Change on Monday, used real-world observations.
When we reach the tipping point, the authors said that the rainforest could quickly disappear. “My hunch, for what it’s worth, (is that) this could happen in the space of decades,” Lenton said.
The study found that the loss of resilience was more pronounced in areas closer to human activity, as well as in those that received less rainfall. The study also noted that the loss of resilience does not equate to a loss of forest cover area – meaning that the rainforest may be close to the point of no return without showing clearly determinable changes.
Chantelle Burton, a senior climate scientist at the Met Office Hadley Center in the UK, said there was a question mark over how the Amazon rainforest would meet the challenges of climate change, land use and fire. She said this new study was “really important.”
“What this study does is offer some observational evidence for what is already happening with this significant carbon sink and shows that human land use and changing weather patterns are already causing a major shift in the system,” he said. Burton to the Science Media Center in London. She was not involved in the research.
“Passing through such a tipping point would make it even more difficult to reach our zero emissions goal globally because of the loss of the ‘free service’ provided by the Amazon carbon sink, which currently removes some of our emissions.”
Richard Allan, a professor of climate science at the University of Reading in the UK, said the study is a “comprehensive and rigorous assessment of the durability of the Amazon”.
“It comes to the tantalizing conclusion that much of the Amazon is showing signs that it may be approaching a tipping point towards irreversible decline; but as various satellite sensors are used to infer the ‘exuberance’ of vegetation, we need to make sure these data records are showing accurate trends,” said Allan, quoted in the SMC statement.
“In any case, it is undeniable that human activities are waging a war of attrition in many ways against the natural world, although fortunately in this case the solutions are known: stop deforestation, while rapidly and massively cutting greenhouse gas emissions. ”.
Source: CNN Brasil
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