It is almost hard to imagine it was once covered in jungle.
Vast plains of pasture and soybeans stretch to the horizon, dotted by grazing cattle and the occasional patch of forest or solitary tree. But Gatti's findings suggest we are teetering on the brink-if not tumbling over it already, at least in part of the Amazon.īrazilian farmer Jose Juliao do Nascimento arrived in the Amazon two decades ago, chasing the dream of a green El Dorado with abundant land. Scientists say it is impossible to be sure just how close the rainforest now is to the tipping point. Under Bolsonaro, deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon has surged from an average of 6,500 square kilometers (2,500 square miles) per year during the previous decade to around 10,000-an area nearly the size of Lebanon. Since then, the destruction has accelerated-especially in Brazil, home to 60 percent of the Amazon, where far-right President Jair Bolsonaro took office in 2019 with strong backing from the farm lobby, pushing to open protected lands and indigenous reservations to agribusiness and mining. Gatti's is one of several recent studies to sound a blaring alarm on the Amazon. That means we're going to reach the horror-show scenario way sooner, too." "The Amazon has become a carbon source way sooner than anyone thought. As bad as the predictions are, they're actually optimistic," says Gatti.
And that's not something our climate models have taken into account.
Home to more than three million species, the rainforest bursts with lush vegetation, which absorbs huge amounts of carbon through photosynthesis-a key fact as humankind struggles to stop heating the planet with greenhouse gases.Īs carbon dioxide emissions have surged by 50 percent in 60 years, to nearly 40 billion tonnes worldwide, the Amazon has absorbed a large amount of that pollution-nearly two billion tonnes a year, until recently.īut humans have also spent the past half-century tearing down and burning whole swathes of the Amazon to make way for cattle ranches and farmland.Īn employee of the Sao Felix do Xingu environment department talks to a farmer to find out who is behind an illegal fire in a nearby area of Amazon rainforest. Splashed across South America in an exuberant blob of deep green, the Amazon basin is one of the world's great wildernesses, a place where life teems in the heat of the tropics, fed by the myriad rivers criss-crossing the jungle like blue blood vessels. Holed up in her lab, Brazilian atmospheric chemist Luciana Gatti crunches her numbers again and again, thinking there is a mistake.īut the same bleak conclusion keeps popping up on her screen: the Amazon, the world's biggest rainforest-the "lungs of the Earth," the "green ocean," the thing humanity is counting on to inhale our pollution and save us from the mess we've made of the planet-is now emitting more carbon than it absorbs.
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