![]() Reforestation elsewhere to achieve the same amount of carbon storage is technically possible, but we have neither the time (several hundred years would be needed) nor the land (at least an equivalent surface area would be required).Īnother reason why reforestation is not a remedy is that the water the rainforest circulates - and with it the availability of nutrients - would disappear. Estimates of where this tipping point could lie range from 40% deforestation to just 20% loss of forest cover from the Amazon. If the Amazon’s cloud systems and its capacity to recycle water were to be disrupted, the ecosystem would tip over and irreversibly turn into dry savannah very quickly. It is during this period, the time without rain, that the forest grows the most. ![]() This image, captured by NASA’s Aqua satellite in 2009, shows how the forest and the atmosphere interact to create a uniform layer of “popcorn” clouds during the dry season. It is also responsible for the circulation of huge quantities of water.Ī uniform layer of tiny ‘popcorn’ clouds covers the Amazon rainforest during the dry season. For comparison, humans emit about 10 billion tonnes of carbon every year through the burning of fossil fuels.īut the Amazon forest does more than store carbon. ![]() Some of this carbon would be taken up by the oceans, and some by other ecosystems (such as temperate or arctic forests), but no doubt this would exacerbate climate warming. If all trees were cut down and burned, the forest’s carbon storage capacity would be lost to the atmosphere. The Amazon rainforest is estimated to harbour about 76 billion tonnes of carbon. Statistic of the decade: The massive deforestation of the Amazon But let’s look at some aspects we can describe. The overall impact of the Amazon’s complete removal is unthinkable and beyond the power of our current predictive tools. But the consequences would be far-reaching for the climate as well as biodiversity and ecosystems - and, ultimately, people. Most people will first think of the carbon currently stored in the Amazon, the world’s largest rainforest.
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