Deforestation

Last month, a portion of the Negro River in the Amazon rainforest near Manaus, Brazil, shrank to a depth of just 12.7 metres — its lowest level in 120 years, when measurements began. In Lake Tefé, about 500 kilometres west, more than 150 river dolphins were found dead, not because of low water levels, but probably because the lake had reached temperatures close to 40 °C.These are symptoms of the unprecedented drought gripping the Amazon rainforest this year. Climate change is involved. But researchers who study the…

By GFZ German Research Center for Geosciences, Helmholtz Centre November 18, 2023The COP28 climate conference will highlight the role of forests as major carbon ‘sinks,’ with a study revealing their potential to absorb up to 226 gigatons of carbon. Despite this, forests are threatened by deforestation and global warming. The research, integrating satellite and ground data, provides a more precise understanding of forest carbon storage, emphasizing GFZ’s role in global carbon stocktaking.Large international study combines…

Brazil is facing a lot of challenges in its bid to stop or even slow down the rapid deforestation of the Amazon forest, To help combat the situation, NASA has decided to step in and share feeds from satellites flying over the Amazon forest…

CLIMATEWIRE | U.S. forests could worsen global warming instead of easing it because they are being destroyed by natural disasters and are losing their ability to absorb planet-warming gases as they get older, a new Agriculture Department report says. The report predicts that the ability of forests to absorb carbon will start plummeting after 2025 and that forests could emit up to 100 million metric tons of carbon a year as their emissions from decaying trees exceed their carbon absorption. Forests could become a…

Conceptual experimental design for testing the influence of fire on the Amazon regrowth potential. After bringing climate and vegetation into equilibrium over 1,500 years under historical atmospheric CO2 concentrations (spin-up phase), for two model set-ups (with and without fire), all trees in the Amazon region are removed and only grass can grow for 250 simulation years (grassland phase). It is followed by another 250 simulation years where trees are…

Scientists analyzed data from 232 Indigenous Territories. Credit: Celso H. L. Silva-Júnior/UFMA Deforestation in Indigenous Territories (ITs) in the Brazilian Amazon caused the emission of 96 million metric tons of carbon dioxide (CO2) between 2013 and 2021, modifying the forest's role as a carbon sink in these areas. Emissions in the last three years of the period (2019–21) accounted for 59%, reflecting intensification of the…

People on the East Coast earlier this month experienced something that occurs with relative frequency in the West: ominous orange skies lit up by dense wildfire smoke. Across the I-95 corridor they responded with many important questions: How bad is the air quality where I live? Can I exercise outside? When will the smoke go away? Many Americans, especially throughout the wildfire-prone West Coast—where climate change is making the infernos worse—are all too familiar with these questions and seek answers from…

If you ever drank a glass of clean water, caught a freshwater fish, swam in a lake or even maybe avoided a flood, you have directly benefited from wetlands. But those benefits are drying up, thanks to a Supreme Court decision that has overturned five decades of wetland protections. The 1972 federal Clean Water Act (CWA) protects the physical, chemical and biological health of the nation’s surface waters. That includes wetlands, swamps, prairie potholes and other saturated places at the transition from dry land to surface…

Nature’s scale can be very difficult to comprehend. The largest rainforest on the planet, for example, the Amazon spans for almost 2.6 million square miles, crossing the borders of nine countries. That’s more than twice the size of India and equivalent to 68 percent of the US total area.Trying to protect something so big is a challenge of similar size and complexity, but that was made easier by Google’s Earth Engine, a geospatial processing service directed to researchers and other public policy experts. Launched in 2010,…

When you hear the word nature, what comes to mind? For me, it’s the lakes of Southern Ontario, where I spent my childhood summers among its pink and gray granite rocks and shadowed pine forests. I picture the rock bass darting through the sunbeams in the water and hear the cicadas humming in the trees. I grew up in the 1970s, and even then, nature was far from untouched. Acid rain and water pollution were already making headlines. Rachel Carson's Silent Spring had raised the alarm in 1962. Seven years later, the Cuyahoga…