A CHANGING WORLD RAINFORESTS
PREVENTING THE AMAZON FROM REACHING A TIPPING POINT The world’s largest rainforest is under threat like never before. The consequences will be felt everywhere By Axel Reiserer, OPEC Fund
A s the UN climate change conference COP30 comes to the Amazon, forests will be a central topic of the 12-day event in Belém. The largest rainforest in the world “is under siege like never before,” warns the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF). The main threats include unchecked agricultural expansion, illegal mining and logging, wildfires and the impacts of climate change, according to the non-profit organization Amazon Conservation. The Amazon rainforest, often called “the lungs of the Earth”, is so big that it makes its own climate: Its billions of trees produce enough moisture to form clouds, which provide at least a third of the forest’s life-sustaining rainfall. But climate change is disrupting this circular process. The build-up of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere has raised regional temperatures, worsened droughts
The Amazon region could
and increased the risk of fires. Fewer trees mean less rainfall, higher temperatures and yet more fires. Climate change induced deforestation therefore risks becoming self-perpetuating.
shift back to being a major carbon sink, removing as much as 18 gigatonnes of carbon over 30 years.
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