Almost half of the Amazon could be at risk of reaching a “tipping point” by the middle of the century due to water stress, according to a new study.
Researchers have been exploring for decades whether the world’s largest rainforest is nearing a threshold where deforestation and climate change unravel the wet weather environment that sustains it, which could cause it to collapse into savannah or a degraded ecosystem.
If such a tipping point was reached, it would be calamitous for the rich array of animals, plants and the 2.2 million indigenous people who live in the Amazon. It would also remove a significant brake on climate change, because of the carbon absorbed by the rainforest’s estimated nearly 400 billion individual trees.