In two literature journals published Thursday, January 26 in “Science”, around fifty international researchers alert on the impact of human activities on this vital ecosystem for climate and biodiversity.
by Audrey Garric
The Amazon forest is seriously ill, and with it the whole planet. In two literature journals published Thursday, January 26 in Science, around fifty international researchers warn against the rapid and deep changes that occur in the lung of the earth due to the pressure of human activities. By provoking both deforestation and accelerated degradation of this region, they threaten the climate, biodiversity, the well-being of local populations, and more broadly humanity.
Exhausting nine countries (mainly Brazil), the Amazon forest is one of the most vital ecosystems on the planet. It houses almost a third of the species known on earth, including 390 billion trees, and helps maintain the cycles of world carbon and water. At the same time, it is particularly vulnerable: 17 % of the original forest has been destroyed, and 9 % strongly degraded, or 26 % assigned, according to First study .
In question: deforestation, caused by agricultural and industrial activities -which has reached record levels in Brazil under the mandate (2019-2023) of Jair Bolsonaro -, and climate change, also caused by human activities. This destruction of Amazonian ecosystems occurs at an unprecedented pace, hundreds or even thousands of times faster than any natural climate or geological phenomenon in the past, prevents the study, figures in support.
Future Net transmitter of CO 2
Acceleration is such that all species, peoples and Amazonian ecosystems cannot adapt to it. So that the Amazon approaches an irreversible rocking point, where whole forests will be definitively transformed into savannas- previous reports had shown that this point of no return had already been reached in certain areas, in the south and east of the basin.
After millions of years to function as a powerful carbon well, the Amazon should soon turn into a net emitter of Co 2 . Both because the forests release carbon when they are destroyed, degraded or burned, but also because being less dense in trees, they can sequestrate it.
The consequences for the climate are vertiginous: the release of all the carbon contained in the Amazonian forests and soils (about 180 billion tonnes) would sufficiently increase the concentration of co 2 in the atmosphere To raise the global temperature of more than one degree, warns James Albert, professor of ecology at the University of Louisiana in Lafayette and the first author of the study. Less trees also means less precipitation, more arid floors, more regular and more important droughts, which will in turn lead to more devastating forest fires, in a vicious circle form.
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