Amazon Rainforest Emits More Greenhouse Gas Than It Now Stops

Analysis shows that the net impact of tropical rainforests, the world’s most biodiverse place, on the environment özgü become negative as a result of human actions.

Deforestation, fires and cattle breeding have led to increased floods and more frequent droughts, which means that the forest now produces higher levels of methane and nitrous oxide as it absorbs carbon dioxide.

Worryingly, the findings show that the Amazon rainforest could actually make it a whole lot worse than helping to reduce global warming.

Because CO2 is the most abundant greenhouse gas in the atmosphere and the Amazon is the world’s largest ‘carbon sink’, it özgü been the focus of most previous research on the Amazon’s impact on global warming.

Therefore, the carbon cycle özgü been firmly placed at the center of the debate surrounding the ongoing climate crisis.

However, methane and nitrous oxide are much stronger chemicals that have a shorter lifespan and occur at much lower levels.

A first-of-its-kind study looked at all the factors that could affect all greenhouse gas emissions and found that, in general, Amazon could become part of the sorun from being part of the solution.

Funded by National Geographic, the researchers were tasked with analyzing pre-existing data on the environmental impact of the Amazon rainforest.

A team of more than 30 scientists özgü been formed and their findings have recently been Frontiers in Forests and Global Change published in the magazine.

They say that due to the complexity of the Amazon ecosystem, predictions and models are difficult to build and therefore high levels of uncertainty.

They conclude in their article, “We concluded that the current warming from non-CO2 materials (especially methane and nitrous oxide) in the Amazon Basin largely offset and likely exceeds the climate service provided by atmospheric CO2 intake,” they say.

They also found that most of the human impact in the area caused the situation to worsen.

In the article, they explain that many trees in the forest absorb carbon dioxide from the air while leaves convert it into energy through photosynthesis.

For example, researchers say Amazon is ‘one of the largest ecosystem carbon pools on Earth’ and stores up to 200 gigatons of carbon, equivalent to all the carbon emissions produced by humans over five years. A gigatonne is the same as 1,000,000,000 tons.

However, the complex ecosystem leads to many more unexpected effects. For example, Amazon trees alone release 3.5 percent of all global methane in a variety of ways.

One such mechanism is that this happens due to frequent flooding of the basin and seeing the water rise from the trees.

Bacteria in the soil that make methane are therefore freed from their underground home and the gas it produces is transferred directly to the atmosphere.

Methane is about 80 times more efficient than CO2 at capturing heat in the atmosphere.

Methane emissions are also increasing in the Amazon because trees are illegally cleaned to make room for livestock farms.

These vast areas are filled with thousands of cows, famously producing large amounts of greenhouse gases in their swelling.

As a result of such mechanisms, the researchers say, ‘A sustained focus on a single metric (i.e. carbon uptake and storage) is incompatible with actual efforts to understand and manage the biogeochemistry of the climate in a rapidly changing Amazon Basin.