Within a century, the Amazon can become a savannah

The Amazon may be advancing faster to a calamitous break that will turn the lush tropical forest into a drier savannah.

A Amazonia is the largest rainforest in the worldcovering more than 6 million square kilometers and housing 10% of plant and animal species in the world. In addition, it is a key element of the global cycles of water and carbon, which regulate the climate.

In the last century, tropical forests such as Amazonia became increasingly vulnerable to stress factors such as droughts and forest fires, driven by climate change and generalized deforestation.

O Global Forest Review do World Resources Institute estimates that the Brazilian Amazon Lost 28,000 square kilometers of forest – an area approximately a third of Portugal – Only in 2024.

Some scientists think these changes are pushing Amazonia to a “Point of Break” where the exuberant tropical forest could turn into drier pasture, like a Savana.

A study recently in Geophysical Research Letters presented a new model about the uncertain future of Amazonia.

As detailed A, it was used what is known as a “single column model”, which in this case simulated only an average location within the Amazon Basin to represent the entire area where the Amazon River and its tributaries drain.

Based on the results of the model, the researchers identified three points of rupture in the Amazonian system:

• one 65% decrease in forest cover;
• one 10% decrease in moisture coming from the Atlantic Ocean;
• or one decreased 6% in precipitation.

In addition to these thresholds, it refers to live science, minor changes in the region’s or forest cover could push the forest beyond the limit, Transforming the ecosystem into pasture.

With fewer trees, there is less evapotranspiration and precipitation, which dries the forest and ends up transforming it into a savannah. “This change can be caused by deforestation, but climate change can also cause it, changing the total amount of water that enters the basin from the Atlantic Ocean,” the study author Andrew Friend told Live Science.

The authors said that urgent action is needed. Indicate that even at the lower limit of the expected scenarios of climate change, continuous deforestation could decimate the Amazon rainforest in the next hundred years.