Climate change a big threat to Amazon

CLIMATE change could speed up large-scale destruction of the Amazon rainforest, conservationists warned yesterday.

Some 55% of the region’s forests are under threat from destruction or severe damage by 2030, as a result of agriculture and livestock expansion, fire, drought and logging, according to a report by the WWF (World Wildlife Fund).

The damage could release between 55.5 billion and 96.9bn tonnes of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere from the Amazon forests and speed up global warming, the WWF warned.

Climate change could in turn speed up the process of destruction by reducing rainfall by up to 10% by 2030, damaging an extra 4% of the forests in that time.

By the end of the century, rainfall could decline by 20% in the eastern Amazon Basin, pushing up temperatures and causing forest fires and dieback (death of plants from shoots to the tips), said a report for the charity.

Destroying almost 60% of tropical rainforest by 2030 would do away with one of the key stabilisers of the global climate system, the Amazon’s Vicious Cycles: Drought and Fire in the Greenhouse report warned.

Such damage could have a knock-on effect on rainfall in places such as central America and India, and would also destroy livelihoods for indigenous people and some 80% of habitats for animal species in the region.

The “point of no return”, in which extensive degradation of the rainforest occurs and conservation prospects are greatly reduced, is just 15-25 years away, the report warns.

Releasing the report at the UN conference in Bali, which aims to begin negotiations on a new international climate-change deal, the WWF called for a strategy to reduce emissions from forests and stop deforestation.

The report’s author, Dan Nepstead, senior scientist at the Woods Hole Research Centre in Massachusetts, said: “The importance of the Amazon forest for the globe’s climate cannot be underplayed... It’s not only essential for cooling the world’s temperature but such a large source of freshwater that it may be enough to influence some of the great ocean currents, and on top of that it’s a massive store of carbon.”