Amazon rainforest (Planet’s lungs): Biodiversity, Deforestation and Climate Change

#SOS_Amazonia #Climate_Change

The Amazon rainforest, also known in English as Amazonia or the Amazon Jungle, is a moist broadleaf tropical rainforest in the Amazon biome that covers most of the Amazon basin of South America. This basin encompasses 7,000,000 km2, of which 5,500,000 km2 are covered by the rainforest. This region includes territory belonging to nine nations. The majority of the forest is contained within :

• Brazil (60%),
• Peru with (13%),
• Colombia (10%), and with minor amounts in Venezuela, Ecuador, Bolivia, Guyana, Suriname and French Guiana.

The vast swaths of rainforest play an important role in the world’s ecosystem because they absorb heat instead of it being reflected back into the atmosphere. They also store carbon dioxide and produce oxygen, ensuring that less carbon is released, and mitigating the effects of climate change.

Biodiversity

The Amazon represents over half of the planet’s remaining rainforests, and comprises the largest and most biodiverse tract of tropical rainforest in the world, with an estimated 390 billion individual trees divided into 16,000 species.

Wet tropical forests are the most species-rich biome, and tropical forests in the Americas are consistently more species rich than the wet forests in Africa and Asia. As the largest tract of tropical rainforest in the Americas, the Amazonian rainforests have unparalleled biodiversity.

One in ten (1/100) known species in the world lives in the Amazon rainforest. This constitutes the largest collection of living plants and animal species in the world. The region is home to about 2.5 million insect species, (100/1000) tens of thousands of plants, and some 2,000 birds and mammals. To date, at least 40,000 plant species, 2,200 fishes, 1,294 birds, 427 mammals, 428 amphibians, and 378 reptiles have been scientifically classified in the region. One in five of all bird species are found in the Amazon rainforest, and one in five of the fish species live in Amazonian rivers and streams. Scientists have described between 96,660 and 128,843 invertebrate species in Brazil alone.

Deforestation

Deforestation is the conversion of forested areas to non-forested areas. The main sources of deforestation in the Amazon are human settlement and development of the land. In 2018, about 17% of the Amazon rainforest was already destroyed. Research suggests that upon reaching about 20–25% (hence 3–8% more), the tipping point to flip it into a non-forest ecosystems (degraded savannah) will be reached.

Record fires sweeping across the Amazon this month (August 2019) are bringing renewed scrutiny to Brazil’s deforestation policy and have environmental researchers and conservationists worried that the blazes will only aggravate the climate change crisis.

There are large negative consequences for climate change globally, as the fires contribute to carbon emissions. If the rainforests are “not allowed to regenerate or be reforested, they will not be able to recover their high potential for carbon storage.”

Conservation and climate change

Environmentalists are concerned about loss of biodiversity that will result from destruction of the forest, and also about the release of the carbon contained within the vegetation, which could accelerate global warming.

Amazonian evergreen forests account for about 10% of the world’s terrestrial primary productivity and 10% of the carbon stores in ecosystems – of the order of 1.1 × 1011 metric tonnes of carbon. The Amazon rainforest could become unsustainable under conditions of severely reduced rainfall and increased temperatures, leading to an almost complete loss of rainforest cover in the basin by 2100. However, simulations of Amazon basin climate change across many different models are not consistent in their estimation of any rainfall response, ranging from weak increases to strong decreases. The result indicates that the rainforest could be threatened though the 21st century by climate change in addition to deforestation.

A study found that a 4 °C rise (above pre-industrial levels) in global temperatures by 2100 would kill 85% of the Amazon rainforest while a temperature rise of 3 °C would kill some 75% of the Amazon.

Deforestation in the Amazon rainforest region has a negative impact on local climate. It was one of the main causes of the severe Drought in Brazil. This is because the moisture from the forests is important to the rainfall in Brazil, Paraguay and Argentina. Half of the rainfall in the Amazon area is produced by the forests.