It’s at risk of turning into a “savanna-like environment.”

Dried Up Husk

The famously verdant Amazon rainforest is in danger of transforming into a dry savannah as various environmental indicators, such as deforestation and climate change, are pushing the ecosystem to a dangerous tipping point, according to new research.

In a study published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters, as spotted by Live Science, a team of European scientists made a computer model of one area of the vast forest, which totals at a staggering 2.3 million square miles, and observed what would happen if they increased the deforestation rate and temperatures to mimic global warming.

“We are reasonably confident that such a shift is possible,” coauthor and University of Cambridge professor Andrew Friend told Live Science. “The question is what degree of climate change and/or deforestation will cause the system to change.”

The team used their computer model to simulate an average patch of the forest to see what would be “the tipping point” for a drastic transformation.

The results were stark: Just a ten percent reduction in precipitation from the Atlantic Ocean, or a more than 65 percent destruction, can push the rainforest into an inexorable path towards “a drier savanna-like environment,” according to the paper.

Amazon Crime

The Amazon rainforest is typically described as the world’s lungs because it sucks up carbon emissions and expels oxygen from its vast quantity of plants and trees.

Though the rate of deforestation has decreased in recent years, the deforested area in Brazil is roughly equivalent to six times the size of New York City.

Felling of the forest increased during the presidency of Jair Bolsonaro, underscoring that the forest’s precarious fate is also tied to politics.

But while Brazil can keep a lid on deforestation, the rest of the forest in other countries, such as Peru and Colombia, has also experienced large-scale harvesting of timber for cropland and other developments.

And that’s not even going into global warming, which is estimated to increase past the 1.5 degrees Celsius marker, an internationally agreed-upon climate change threshold.

In other words, even if we stall deforestation, the runaway impact of excessive carbon emissions may turn the Amazon rainforest into something unrecognizable.

“Both climate change and deforestation have to be reduced over the next 10-20 years if we want to be confident that the system will remain intact,” Friend told Live Science. “Our understanding is far from complete, and we may be wrong about how the system will respond to these threats, but it would be unwise to rely on this possibility.”

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