Amazon rainforest: Deforestation, drought, and fire are affecting the monsoon and leading to a dangerous tipping point
REDD proponents continue to push the false solution of storing carbon in trees - and trading that carbon against continued emissions from burning fossil fuels
The Amazon rainforest regulates local, regional, and global climate. That could change for the worse if deforestation and climate change continues.
A recent paper published in Science Advances highlights what’s happening to the Amazon:
Climate change causes warming and is altering rainfall patterns.
Deforestation carves deeper into the Amazon each year, and nearly 20% of the Amazon has already been cleared.
Deforestation reduces the amount of water that the forest pumps back into the atmosphere, resulting in further reductions in rainfall.
“How resilient is the Amazon Forest to these threats?” ask the authors, D. V. Spracklen of the School of Earth and Environment at the University of Leeds, and C. A. S. Coelho of the Instituto Nacional de Pesquisas Espaciais (INPE) in Brazil.
Their answer is disturbing. Spracklen and Coelho write that some studies suggest that with 3°C warming or clearance of somewhere between 20 and 40% of the forest, rainfall could decline so much “that the rest of the Amazon Forest can no longer survive”.
This is known as Amazon dieback and it would be a devastating climate tipping point:
Death of the forest would lead to a large pulse of carbon dioxide emissions that would further accelerate climate change. The future of the Amazon is therefore critical not only to the 50 million people who live there but also to everyone on our planet.
Monsoons and deforestation
Another paper in the same issue of Science Advances looks at how deforestation and the South American monsoon are related.
The authors, Nils Bochow and Niklas Boers, both of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany, designed a dynamical model of the Amazon rainforest and the climate system.
As deforestation increases the model simulates a gradual decline in rainfall. But when deforestation hits a critical threshold, rainfall abruptly declines by 30 to 50%.
Bochow and Boers explain the findings of their research as follows:
We showed that forest loss, caused by direct deforestation, droughts, and fires, might vastly contribute to a changing climate in Amazonia and could drive the coupled rainforest-monsoon circulation system past a tipping point. Recent changes in precipitation patterns, increasing DSL [dry season length], reduced soil moisture, and more frequent extreme events might be much stronger linked to deforestation than previously assumed. The results presented here suggest an upcoming regime shift of the Amazon ecosystem if deforestation is not brought to a halt.
“Incredibly simple to just stop deforestation”?
Boers told The Guardian that,
“My emotional response is anger. With every square kilometre of deforestation, every fraction of degree of global warming, we are raising the risk of a tipping point. Yet, it is incredibly simple to just stop deforestation. It is an absolutely unique ecosystem that we really can’t afford to lose.”
I suspect that Boers thinks stopping deforestation is “incredibly simple” is because he’s used to dealing with mathematics, theoretical physics, complexity science, and equations like these:
Back in 2007, Jens Stoltenberg, then-prime minister of Norway, said in a speech at COP13 in Bali that,
Through effective measures against deforestation we can achieve large cuts in greenhouse gas emissions – quickly and at low cost. The technology is well known and has been available for thousands of years. Everybody knows how not to cut down a tree.
Since then, of course, deforestation has continued to rise.
The reality is that stopping deforestation is fiendishly complicated. Deforestation is driven by a complex series of underlying causes, some of which are within the forestry sector, some of which are not.
Economic policies, development policies, corruption, infrastructure development, extractivism, commodity prices, land rights, Indigenous Peoples’ rights, conservation, colonialism, and neoliberal capitalism are all complex political issues. And all have a role in deforestation.
That’s not to say (obviously) that we shouldn’t massively reduce deforestation.
But REDD is a carbon trading mechanism. For every tonne of CO₂ that remains in the forest as a result of “avoided deforestation”, one tonne of CO₂ is added to the atmosphere by burning fossil fuels. And that’s assuming that the “avoided deforestation” is genuine and not based on a fake baseline (which is an impossible assumption to make).
Burning fossil fuels is what’s causing the climate crisis. As the global temperature increases, the Amazon tipping point gets closer and closer.
If we consider REDD as a carbon capture and storage mechanism, it makes no sense whatsoever to store carbon in an ecosystem that is moving towards a tipping point that would result in “a large pulse of carbon dioxide emissions that would further accelerate climate change”.
Research published in 2021 revealed that the Brazilian Amazon is no longer a carbon sink. One of the co-authors of the study, Jean-Pierre Wigneron, at France’s National Institute for Agronomic Research (INRA), told Agence France-Presse that,
We half-expected it, but it is the first time that we have figures showing that the Brazilian Amazon has flipped, and is now a net emitter.
Amazon drought
While deforestation has fallen since President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva assumed office in January 2023, this year’s drought in the Amazon is terrifying.
Here’s how Associated Press journalist Edmar Barros describes the drought:
Communities dependent on the Amazon rainforest’s waterways are stranded without supply of fuel, food or filtered water. Dozens of river dolphins perished and washed up on shore. And thousands of lifeless fish float on the water’s surface.
Eight states in Brazil recording the lowest rainfall in over 40 years for July to September this year. By early October 2023, 42 of 62 municipalities in Amazonas had declared a state of emergency.
In September 2023, more than 150 Amazonian river dolphins died in Lake Tefé. Ayan Fleischmann, a geoscience researcher at the Mamirauá Institute, measured the temperature of the water in the lake. It was 39°C. “This is very hot, horrible,” he told The Guardian.
When Dr. Boers of Potsdam Institute says something, you listen. You listen real hard. If the Romans could come back, they would be able to tell you what happened to their "bread basket" in N. Africa from clearing and farming an area similar to the Amazon. What is it now? It can never come back. If we had oxygen pricing, we could offer income to Brazil to avoid selling off the trees. But yes, development has been an issue there since the beginning, when their govt chose to plunk the capital in the midst of the rain forest, driving the stake of development into the heart of the jungle. Then came the highways, and like they say, if you build it they will come, and they did, and the rest is history, a sad history. Remember that the entire planet was already involved in balancing the carbon cycle before human environmental degradation began, so it is worthless to sell some forest to offset an ongoing emission. Unfortunately, the inertia built into every human governing system prevents timely reassessment and change.