Touted as the largest tract of tropical rainforest in the world, the Amazon rainforest spans 5.5 million square kilometers (2.1 million square miles); it contains more than half of the world’s remaining rainforests. Being the largest rainforest, the Amazon also possesses unparalleled biodiversity, with about one in every ten known species in the world living inside it. Unfortunately, however, all these stellar records for the legendary forest are in danger of decreasing, as continued human-caused damage to the forest has robbed it of its wildlife and trees. Perhaps the most ominous warning of humanity’s devastating impact on the Amazon came in the form of a study published last July 14 in the journal Nature, wherein researchers showed that the forest now actually produces more greenhouse gases than it absorbs.
In the study, the researchers performed 590 measurements of the said rainforest’s carbon dioxide (CO2) and carbon monoxide (CO) concentrations across four sites and in the span of nine years—from 2010 to 2018—from samples obtained using small aircraft. Results from analyzing these samples showed that the Amazon is capable of removing 500 million metric tons of CO2 each year. While impressive at first glance, it’s the rest of the results that paint a grim picture: the forest, whose CO2 and CO gases are produced mostly by nearby forest fires, releases around 1.5 billion metric tons of CO2 yearly, resulting in the forest producing a net annual amount of around 1 billion metric tons of CO2—about as much as the entirety of Japan, the world’s fifth-largest polluter.
Some of the forest fires that produced these gases are man-made; humans are burning tracts of forest to make way for agricultural land and industry. The steady increase in global temperature averages as a result of human-induced climate change doesn’t help, either; this leads to the Amazon rainforest being stuck in a positive feedback loop, where hotter temperatures lead to drier seasons and more chances of forest fires—human-induced ones aside—which further feed the engines that worsen the climate crisis. Of particular concern is the eastern Amazon region, whose continued deforestation has caused the region to become drier, hotter, and more prone to fires compared to the rest of the forest. The western Amazon, by comparison, still remains relatively carbon-neutral; the amount of carbon emissions it releases is about the same as that which it absorbs on a yearly basis.
As lead author and Brazil’s Instituto Nacional de Pesquisas Espaciais researcher Luciana Gatti said to The Guardian: “The first very bad news is that forest burning produces around three times more CO2 than the forest absorbs. […] The second bad news is that the places where deforestation is 30% or more show carbon emissions 10 times higher than where deforestation is lower than 20%.” According to her, the forest can still revert back to being a carbon sink if we prohibit fires from starting in the forest; instead, she said, “we are doing the opposite—we are accelerating climate change.”
Bibliography
- Carrington, D. (2021, July 14). Amazon rainforest now emitting more CO2 than it absorbs. The Guardian. Retrieved September 2, 2021, from https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/jul/14/amazon-rainforest-now-emitting-more-co2-than-it-absorbs
- Specktor, B. (2021, July 15). The Amazon rainforest is officially creating more greenhouse gases than it is absorbing. LiveScience. Retrieved September 2, 2021, from https://www.livescience.com/amazon-rainforest-accelerate-climate-change.html
- Gatti, L.V., Basso, L.S., Miller, J.B. et al. Amazonia as a carbon source linked to deforestation and climate change. Nature 595, 388–393 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-021-03629-6
