Researchers have confirmed once again that if the Amazon rainforest is one of the planet’s “green lungs”, it may be running short of breath.
Repeated drought and tree loss mean that there is increasing risk that the forest may one day cease to be a “sink” for atmospheric carbon released by the combustion of fossil fuels.
Scientists who monitor the Amazon Basin have for years been pointing out that loss of tree canopy is contributing to imminent climate disaster and that extreme weather events associated with climate change can only make things worse, Climate Home reported.
They have also explained that the forest’s role as a carbon sink that right now holds 100 billion tons of carbon in the form of roots, wood and foliage is not just threatened.
In a severe and prolonged drought, the forest is actually likely to release more carbon into the atmosphere, to stoke up further warming.
So the latest study, published in Global Biogeochemical Cycles journal is just another confirmation of some alarming portents.
Researchers looked at two dramatic droughts in 2005 and 2010.
They gathered measurements across nearly 100 locations and observed that, while both severe droughts killed trees, the second of the two slowed the growth rates of the survivors in the years that followed. The implication is that what didn’t kill trees made them weaker.
Study leader Ted Feldpausch, senior lecturer in geography at the University of Exeter in the UK, says: “The first large-scale, direct demonstration of tropical drought slowing tree growth is extremely important.
“It tells us that climate changes not only increase the rate of loss of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere, by killing trees, but also slow down the rate of uptake.
“And yet the Amazon clearly has resilience, because in the years between the droughts, the whole system returned to being a carbon sink, with growth outstripping mortality.”
His co-author, Oliver Phillips, professor in the School of Geography at the University of Leeds in the UK, says that “the Amazon has been providing a tremendous service, taking up hundreds of millions more tons of carbon every year in tree growth than it loses through tree death. But both the 2005 and 2010 droughts eliminated those gains.”
