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'The Amazon Basin Could Become a CO2 Emitter' Scientists Warn

  • Fire burns by the side of the road between Porto Velho and Humaita in Brazil's Amazonas state, Sep. 5, 2019.

    Fire burns by the side of the road between Porto Velho and Humaita in Brazil's Amazonas state, Sep. 5, 2019. | Photo: Reuters

Published 11 January 2020
Opinion

Up to 17 billion tons of carbon dioxide could be released in the atmosphere if the Amazon forests lose their capacity to store carbon.

The Science Advances journal Friday published a study showing that climate change-induced fires could transform the Amazon basin from a carbon dioxide (CO2) absorber to a net emitter of gases, which will contribute to an additional warming of the planet's atmosphere​​​​​​​.​​​​​​​

RELATED:

Number of Fires in Brazilian Amazon Increased 30% in 2019

"Forest fires triggered by an increasingly hot and dry climate can double the burned area and devastate up to 16 percent of the tropical rainforest in the southern Brazilian Amazon by 2050, so that region could lose its receptor function of CO2," Paulo Brando, from the Department of Land Systems of the University of California, holds.​​​​​​​

The Amazon Research Institute in Brasilia, the Geosciences Institute of the University of Minas Gerais, and NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center collaborated with this research.

The scientists found out that CO2 emissions accumulating in the atmosphere can lead the Amazon to a new state of low biomass, which will alter rainfall and temperature regimes in the region.

"Global warming can leave the Amazon drier and fire-prone. The Australian catastrophe is an alert bell."

Since forest fires in the Amazon basin will most likely continue to intensify until 2030, this region will emit around 17 billion tons of CO2 by mid-century.

If this happens, then the Amazon will no longer be an area of the planet where the absorption of greenhouse gases is greater than the CO2 emission.​​​​​​

Between 2004 and 2014, deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon decreased by 70 percent, which avoided the equivalent of 12 percent of annual global CO2 emissions.​​​​​​​

In the same period, however, there was a worldwide acceleration of the ​​​​​​​CO2 emissions that contribute to atmospheric warming.

"The interactions between agricultural activities, illegal fires, and extreme weather events intensified the recurrence of fires in the Amazon and their emissions," Brando explained.

In the 2000s alone, the fires ended with 85,000 square kilometers of Amazon's primary forests, mainly during the droughts of 2005 and 2010.​​​​​​​

In August 2019, Brazil's National Space Research Institute (INPE) reported more than 80,000 fires throughout its country, which represented a 77 percent increase over the previous year.

More than 40,000 of those fires happened in the Brazilian Amazon, which occupies 60 percent of the entire Amazon basin.

For their study, Brando and his colleagues developed a model on how the interactions between climate change and deforestation in a region of 192 million acres within the driest region of the Brazilian Amazon affected the amount of land burned and the gases released as a result of the fires​​​​​​​.

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