‘Terrifying’: Amazon rainforest could collapse in 50 years
- The Amazon ecosystem could pass a point-of-no-return as soon as next year, scientists warn
- Comes as world’s tropical forests rapidly loose their capacity to absorb planet-warming carbon dioxide
The Amazon rainforest is nearing a threshold which, once crossed, would see one of the world’s largest and richest ecosystems morph into arid savannah within half-a-century, scientists said.
Another major ecosystem, Caribbean coral reefs, could die off in only 15 years were it to pass its own point-of-no-return, the scientists reported in the journal Nature Communications.
Each of these so-called “regime changes” would have dire consequences for humanity and other species with which we share habitat, they warned.
In both cases the projected tipping point for irreversible change results from global warming and environmental damage – deforestation in the case of the Amazon, and pollution and acidification for corals.
The UN’s climate science advisory panel, the IPCC, has said that 1.5 degrees Celsius of atmospheric warming above pre-industrial levels would doom 90 per cent of the world’s shallow-water corals. A 2 degrees rise would spell their near-complete demise.
Earth’s surface has already heated up more than 1 degree.