BOGOTA — Drought and heat driven by climate change and other factors threaten to cause the collapse of South America’s lush Amazon rainforest system, scientists said on Wednesday in a study that found that nearly half of it could be pushed to a tipping point by 2050.
“The region is increasingly exposed to unprecedented stress from warming temperatures, extreme droughts, deforestation and fires, even in central and remote parts of the system,” the researchers wrote in the study published in the journal Nature.
The researchers estimated that 10% to 47% of Amazon’s current forest cover will face these combined stressors by 2050.
“Once we cross this tipping point, maybe we cannot do anything anymore,” said ecologist Bernardo Flores of the University of Santa Catarina in Brazil, lead author of the report. “The forest will die by itself.”
It is time, Flores added, to declare a “red alert” for the Amazon, the world’s largest tropical rainforest.
With warming temperatures sapping the region of moisture, the rainforest is steadily turning into savannah or other forms of degraded ecosystems more likely to burn in wildfires, according to experts. This transformation marks a major change for the Amazon, where most fires now are fanned by ranchers or farmers clearing land. As the land dries out, more wildfires could erupt as they do in the drier pine forests of the U.S. West and Canada.
Scientists Warn That A Disturbing Trend In The Amazon Rainforest Is Not An Isolated Anomaly: ‘We Should Be Really Worried’
For their analysis, the researchers looked at forested areas and considered climate and human factors, including past and projected temperatures and rainfall, forest road-building trends, and land management status such as whether a forest is a preserve or is maintained by Indigenous groups.
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