Growing threat to Amazon’s crucial carbon sink
Massive new study shows that pressures on the Amazon rainforest mean it can no longer be relied on to soak up more CO2 from the atmosphere than it puts out.
LONDON, 19 March, 2015 − The Amazon rainforest, for so long one of the vital “green lungs” of the planet, is losing its capacity to absorb carbon from the atmosphere, according to new research.
Two decades ago, the forest drew down a peak of two billion tonnes of carbon dioxide each year from the atmosphere. Now, according to a massive new study in Nature journal by more than 90 scientists, the rate of withdrawal has fallen to around half that total.
Fossil fuel emissions from Latin American countries are now running at more than a billion tonnes of CO2. So the region is putting more greenhouse gas into the atmosphere than it is taking out.
The finding is ominous. The Amazon rainforest has always been a big item in the climate modellers’ carbon budget − the calculation of carbon dioxide from fossil fuels burned, set against the natural absorption of the same trace gases by the biosphere.
Unique research
The implication now is that the forest is no longer a carbon “sink” that that can be relied upon to take up a predictable proportion of fossil fuel emissions.
The conclusion is the outcome of a unique international research network’s 30-year study of 189,000 individual trees in 321 plots of forest dotted across six million square kilometres in eight South American countries. And it has revealed a huge surge in the rate of tree deaths across the Amazon basin.
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