Paul Eccleston, The Telegraph 6 Dec 07;
More than half of the Amazon rainforest could disappear or be damaged by climate change and deforestation by 2030, a new report warns.
At the same time the clearing of forests to make way for crops and livestock could release almost 100 billion tonnes of CO2 - the equivalent of more than two years of total global greenhouse gas emissions.
The destruction would threaten one of the key influences on helping keep the global climate cool, according to the WWF report.
It warns that the future of the Amazon is on a knife-edge and if logging and the spread of farming is allowed to continue unchecked - fuelled by world demand for soya, biofuel, and meat - the forests will be caught up in a vicious spiral of slash and burn leading to a dramatic reduction in rainfall.
The report, The Amazon's Vicious Cycles: Drought and Fire in the Greenhouse, was released to coincide with the Bali climate summit.
WWF used the report's findings to call for measures which would reduce cattle ranching and farming and expand protected areas.
Dan Nepstad, Senior Scientist at the Woods Hole Research Centre in Massachusetts, and the report's author, said: "The importance of the Amazon forest for the globe's climate cannot be underplayed.
"It's not only essential for cooling the world's temperature but also such a large source of freshwater that it may be enough to influence some of the great ocean currents, and on top of that it's a massive store of carbon."
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The report claims that changes already under way in the Amazon are much further ahead than had been predicted and will lead to extensive conversion and degradation over the next 15-25 years.
As much as 55 per cent of the forests could be lost or damaged by agriculture and livestock expansion, fire, drought and logging.
An ecological tipping point would be reached when a combination of all these factors would reduce pristine rainforest to fireprone brush with a consequent loss of biodiversity and the chances of conserving the forest greatly reduced.
Forests that burn are more susceptible to further burning because the loss of trees allows more sunlight to reach the forest interior, drying dead leaves and branches on the forest floor.
The loss of the Amazon forests could speed up global climatic disruption, influencing the amount of rainfall in far-flung places around the planet.
Some models indicate that rainfall could decline in India and Central America, and that less rain may fall during the crop growing season in the grain belts of Brazil and the United States of America.
If the trends continue important eco-regions of the Amazon, such as the Maranhão babaçu forest, the Marañon dry forest and the cloud forests of Bolivia would be lost and many species of animal, including several primates, will lose more than 80 per cent of their forest habitat over the next few decades.
Beatrix Richards, head of forests at WWF-UK. said: "The Amazon is on a knife edge due to the dual threats of deforestation and climate change.
"Developed countries have a key role to play in throwing a lifeline to forests around the world.
"At the international negotiations currently underway in Bali governments must agree a process which results in ambitious global emission reduction targets beyond the current phase of Kyoto which ends in 2012. Crucially this must include a strategy to reduce emissions from forests and help break the cycle of deforestation."
The report called for a bold new conservation strategy for the Amazon which would avoid the tipping point and allow the forests to rapidly regrow.
Freed from the slash and burn policy and properly protected, the Amazon would return to closed-canopy forest and would recover its rainfall stabilisation role within 15 years.
The report concludes: "There is still time to lower the risk of widespread forest degradation and the acceleration of global warming that it would stimulate.
"All opportunities to govern Amazon frontier expansion must be seized. One of the most promising approaches to the large-scale conservation of Amazon forests is to compensate tropical nations for their reductions in heat-trapping gas emissions from tropical forests."
LINK
Climate change speeds up Amazon’s destruction on the WWF website
