More than a third of the Amazon rainforest may have been degraded by human activity and drought, researchers said Thursday, and action is needed to protect this critically important ecosystem for the world.
In a study published in the journal Science, researchers said the damage done to the forest spanning nine countries is significantly greater than previously known.
For the study, the researchers examined the impact of fire, logging, drought and changes in habitat along forest edges – what they called edge effects.
Most previous research on the Amazonian ecosystem has focused on the consequences of deforestation.
The study found that fire, logging and edge effects degraded at least 5.5% of all remaining forest in the Amazon, or 364,748 km², between 2001 and 2018.
But when the effects of drought are accounted for, the degraded area increases to 2.5 million km² or 38% of the remaining Amazon rainforest.
“Extreme droughts have become increasingly frequent in the Amazon as land use changes and human-induced climate change advance, affecting tree mortality, fire incidence and carbon emissions to the atmosphere” , the researchers said.
“Forest fires intensify during dry years,” they added, warning of the dangers of “much larger megafires” in the future.
The researchers at the State University of Campinas and other institutions used satellite imagery and other data from 2001 to 2018 to reach their conclusions.
In a separate study published in Science of the human impacts on the Amazon, researchers at the University of Louisiana Lafayette and elsewhere called for action.
“The Amazon is poised to make a rapid transition from a largely natural landscape to a degraded and transformed landscape, under the combined pressures of regional deforestation and global climate change,” they said.
“Changes are happening too quickly for Amazonian species, peoples and ecosystems to respond adaptively,” they added. “Policies to prevent the worst outcomes are known and should be implemented immediately.”
“Failure in the Amazon is failure in the biosphere, and we fail to act at our peril,” they concluded.
The President of the Republic, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, has promised to end deforestation in the Amazon by 2030.
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