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Climate: Deforestation of the Amazon rainforest reaches record levels

2021-08-19T17:37:53.715Z


In 2020, fires destroyed more Amazon rainforest than ever before. Drought, arson and deforestation are accelerating the destruction. More is currently being cleared than it has been in years.


Enlarge image

Fire in the south of the Amazon rainforest.

The photo was taken in early August.

Photo: Sandro Pereira / imago images / Fotoarena

The destruction of the rainforest in the southern Amazon region and the Pantanal, the world's largest wetland area, by fire has reached a new all-time high after 2019.

Around 100,000 fires were registered.

This emerges from a new climate report by the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) on the situation in South America.

In the Pantanal area alone, which stretches between Bolivia, Paraguay and Brazil, 26 percent of the total area burned last year - four times as much as the average for the last two decades.

In the Brazilian Amazon region, the number of fires in the first half of the year was below that of the devastating previous years - but as many trees were felled between March and June of this year as most recently in 2015, the data show.

"Illegal and legal deforestation has increased in the Amazon basin in the last four years," said Jose Marengo of the National Center for Monitoring Natural Disasters in Sao Paulo, one of the study authors.

300 million South Americans suffer from climate change

Up until now, the Amazon rainforest was a huge store of CO2. With every fire, however, more climate-damaging emissions escape into the atmosphere. "Fire and deforestation are now threatening one of the largest carbon sinks in the world, with far-reaching and long-term effects," warns WMO Secretary General Petteri Taalas. About ten percent of all carbon dioxide is stored in the Amazon, which extends over nine countries.

Without a quick stop to the destruction of the rainforest, the storage facility threatens to turn into a source of carbon dioxide.

This point is reached when the trees bind less carbon than is lost overall.

A study recently published in the journal Nature believes that this point has already been exceeded in some cases.

The eastern Amazon region in particular emits more emissions than it binds in the dry season.

For decades, the largest rainforest on the planet withdrew large amounts of carbon dioxide from the earth's air envelope through photosynthesis, thus dampening climate change.

That has changed, reports Luciana Gatti's team from the Brazilian National Institute for Space Research.

The bottom line is that around 290 million tons of carbon were released into the atmosphere from the area from 2010 to 2018, mainly because of the many fires.

According to the analysis, these released 410 million tons of carbon annually, with 120 million tons of the vegetation only removing a fraction of this amount from the air.

Around 60 percent of the remaining rainforest on earth is in Central and South America.

The region is already suffering severely from climate change.

According to the WMO report, rising temperatures, extreme droughts, floods and tropical cyclones have killed more than 310,000 people since 1998.

Almost 300 million were directly affected by the effects.

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Source: spiegel

All tech articles on 2021-08-19

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