The Amazon is bad and it will get worse. This is the conclusion of a study published in the prestigious journal Nature. According to its authors, at the current rate of climate change, it could even turn into a savannah. A disaster obviously for the climate and the biodiversity it hosts.
The moment when a system is so disrupted that it eventually collapses is called a tipping point. And under the blows of global warming and deforestation, that of the Amazon forest could occur faster than expected.
To reach this conclusion, the authors of the study used 25 years of satellite data. The report is terrible: three quarters of the surface of the forest are in poor health and the regions most affected by man have already lost a large part of their ability to adapt.
Eventually, the green lung will irremediably turn into savannah. This will obviously not happen overnight, but some models are already anticipating a start of the process as early as 2050. This new study confirms a bad trend; it was recently discovered that its Brazilian part now emits more carbon than it sequesters.
Risk of cascading effect
After the tipping point would then come the cascading effect. According to the authors, the transformation of the Amazon basin into savannah would have enormous consequences, in fact 90 billion tonnes of CO2 would be released into the atmosphere, enough to amplify global warming and increasingly disturb other ecosystems.
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