The Amazon is the world’s largest rainforest, spanning More than 2 million square miles (5.2 million square kilometers)) – an area 12 times larger than California. It affects global water cycles, reserves global carbon emissions yearssupports 47 million peopleand is the home of The largest concentration of biodiversity on Earth.
But Amazon rainforest is also disappearing with 17% of it has already been cut down or destroyed and were largely replaced by agriculture. Other serious threats like oil drilling and illegal mining are continuously weakening it. The importance of the next century may be enormous, e.g. Forest may reach “tipping point”“
so what will happen Amazon rainforest Will you look like this in 100 years?
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The answer depends on many complex threats, Bernardo Floresa researcher from the Equalsee Lab at the University of Santiago de Compostela in Spain told Live Science.
Encroachment on agricultural land and organized crime are some of the problems plaguing the Amazon. But they work in line with the three main threats it perceives: Climate changewhich can lead to extreme weather events, “such as extreme wet seasons and extreme dry seasons,” deforestation And fire.
As the Amazon loses more of its forests, it triggers a feedback loop. “You have less rainfall; so you have less forests, [then] Less rainfall, less forests,” Flores explained. “This ultimately leads to a global-scale response related to the Amazon: more forest loss.” [leads to] More global warming. More global warming, more forest loss.”
As forests become drier, it becomes easier for wildfires to burn more areas. Roads also degrade forests, and “wherever you have roads, you have people doing illegal activities, illegal logging… so it happens [more] Wildfire,” Flores said.
“Deforestation arc” – considered to be an extent of approximately 310,000 square miles (500,000 square km) along the Amazon The largest extent of deforestation in the world – According to Flores, much of Amazon offers a preview of what it might eventually look like. the forests left there High tree mortality and long canopy gapsAnd they are often “covered with vines,” or woody vinesIt has become an ecological problem, he said. lianas compete with trees for light and nutrients in the soil, and substantially reduces not only a tree’s chances of survival but also the overall diversity of trees in the forest. He further said, “When the entire forest is covered with vines, you cannot see the forest.”
invasive grass introduced by cattlemen This is likely to increase in the coming decades, he said, but “only certain parts” of the Amazon may become “savanna”, because the savanna is a native, biodiverse ecosystem. Flores said the invasive grass “crowds out native species, reducing biodiversity” and will not allow native savanna grasses to replace the forest. Instead, one possibility is that “degraded open-canopy ecosystem,” where native, naturally fire-tolerant trees grow together with invasive grasses, vines and ferns, Flores told Live Science.
Deforestation poses a serious threat to the longevity of the Amazon rainforest.
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Wildlife will also be affected soon. Aquatic species are especially vulnerable, Flores said. “When you start having droughts that last one, two, three years,” he said, “wetlands will dry up and become flammable.” This “could lead to very rapid extinction in those areas.”
The destruction of the Amazon rainforest would be devastating to the indigenous people living there, Christian Poirierthe program director of Amazon Watch, an environmental and indigenous rights advocacy group, told Live Science. “Imagine having your backyard bulldozed and your water source being poisoned,” he said. “You probably need to move from where you live, and that’s exactly what’s happening in Amazon.”
A devastated Amazon would also lead to a “more chaotic global climate system,” Flores said. There may be less rain all around parts of south americaAnd global warming will get worse. Earth may eventually reach a tipping point where the ice sheets will melt, sea currents become rough And the collapse of the Amazon all at once accelerated temperature increases, he said, causing the planet to “pass the tipping point and transition to a much hotter climate”. potentially irreversible consequences.
Unlike other major climate risks such as Greenland ice sheet likely to melt And while contributing to sea level rise, deforestation could theoretically be more easily reversed by reforestation, it said. Erie StahlAssistant Professor of Ecosystem Resilience at Utrecht University in the Netherlands.
“This gives us a knob to turn that we don’t have for other potential tipping points on Earth,” he told Live Science. “It’s clear that we really need to stop deforestation in the Amazon. And there is hope.”
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