Amazon Rainforest Hurtling Toward ‘Tipping Point’

We’ve been hearing for a number of years now about the disastrous melting of the polar ice caps. The warming oceans. The growing ozone hole in the atmosphere. But there is one part of the world that may affect the speed of climate change sooner than any of these other nightmarish issues, even while it is a place that still appears lush and relatively healthy: the Amazon rainforest.

Scientists are warning in a new paper, published in the journal Nature Climate Change this week, that the Amazon may reach a “tipping point” of no return sooner than anyone had previously thought, and that this shift will be catastrophic for the planet.

The rainforest eats billions of tons of carbon dioxide and stores it safely in its vegetation, which prevents it from adding to the already substantial amount of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. The new study, based on three decades of satellite data, shows that the forest, however, is fast losing its resilience. In the last 20 years, deforested and drought-affected areas have not recovered as expected — aka not enough trees are growing to replace all the ones felled by humans to create cattle ranches and plunder timber, and natural disasters. That means that the rainforest of the last 50 million years could suddenly switch over to dry savanna, with no chance of recovery.

That, in turn, means our world’s largest carbon sink, which covers 2.6 million square miles, would give up its stores, thereby sending what Greenpeace estimates is about 100 billion tons of carbon into our atmosphere — accelerating global warming and changing weather patterns irrevocably.

“As a scientist, I am not supposed to have anxiety,” Carlos Nobre, a climate scientist at the University of São Paulo’s Institute of Advanced Studies told The Washington Post. “But after reading this paper, I am very, very anxious.”

Along with calamitous atmospheric changes, passing the Amazon’s tipping point would mean a cataclysmic loss of biodiversity — more than three million species of plants and animals live in the rainforest — as well as a loss of livelihoods for the indigenous people who rely on its wildlife to eat and sell and its plant life for shelter and medicine, not to mention its wonders to attract tourists.

Scientists estimate that about 45 percent of the still-intact forest lies within indigenous territories. This means that strengthening protections for indigenous people would also protect the world’s most precious resources.

“When you have almost half of the intact forest in the Amazon in Indigenous and Afro-descendant territories, then they have to be a big part of any discussion about a tipping point,” David Kaimowitz, manager of the Food and Agriculture Organization’s Forest and Farm Facility, told the nonprofit environmental news site Mongabay.

Unfortunately, Kaimowitz said, government support for these indigenous territories is declining “at a time when they should be increasing dramatically.”

Scientists have been warning for a while that a tipping point is possible with the Amazon, but the new research shows that it is more likely to happen than not, and probably sooner than anyone thought. And once the cascade of rainforest failure begins, it will gather steam toward the abyss quickly.

“Once it starts, my sense is it could happen in decades,” Chris Boulton, a scientist at the University of Exeter and lead author of the study, told Scientific American.