The research revealed that the Amazon rainforest 'has been losing resilience since the early 2000s, risking dieback with profound implications for biodiversity, carbon storage, and climate change at a global scale.'
New research reveals lost rainforest resiliency imperils biodiversity, carbon storage, and the climate"at a global scale."The ability of the Amazon rainforest to recover from devastating droughts and wildfires has been declining over the past two decades, driving the crucial ecosystem to what authors of a study published Monday called a"critical transformation" with"profound" consequences.
"The core idea is, if the system is heading toward a tipping point, where by definition it's getting less stable, this means that before that happens, it gets slower recovering from all these perturbations, like the drought events that are happening year to year," said Tim Lenton, another University of Exeter climate scientist and study co-author.
"Other factors, including rising atmospheric temperatures in response to anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions, may additionally have negative effects on Amazon resilience," the publication adds.,"areas closer to human destruction of the forest also became more unstable. Trees are crucial in producing rain, so felling them to clear land for beef and soy production creates a vicious circle of drier conditions and more tree loss.
Under right-wing Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro—the self-proclaimed"Captain Chainsaw"—deforestation in the country containing approximately 60% of the Amazon rainforest hasThe Brazilian Amazon ecosystem, as well as the nearly million Indigenous people from over 300 tribes who live there, are under increasing threat from development including logging, mining, expansion of agricultural activity, and the construction of a major highway and dam.