A group of scientists say that the Amazon Rainforest is on the verge of collapse and could become a dry savanna in five years.
Luciana Gatti is a senior climate change researcher at the Brazilian National Institute for Space Research. She told New Scientist that the Amazon could be five years away from a total environmental disaster.
She told the magazine that we were about to collapse. We need action now because we are in an emergency.
She said it was a nightmare.
Amazon Savannisation.
The Science Panel for the Amazon's (SPA) bleak assessment report of the world's largest rainforest was published last month.
Climate change and Brazil's massive destruction of the Amazon rainforest are two of the factors identified in a comprehensive report as pointing to the rainforest's collapse.
A scientist told New Scientist that it would take between 20 and 25 percent of the forest to be de-forested due to the warming of the forest.
This is a recipe for a process called "savannisation", in which a forest is dried up due to reduced rain, and becomes a dry, arid grassland.
Earth was dying.
We have five years. Can we do anything?
There is a small window of opportunity to change this trajectory. Mercedes Bustamante is a Biologist at the University of Brasilia and a member of the SPA.
At the minimum, this would mean an immediate halt to all deforestation efforts. This would need to be followed by an aggressive reforestation campaign in order to restore the rainforest.
Good luck getting any of that done within five years. The truth is that any effort to prevent the Amazon rainforest from collapsing needed to be done decades ago.
That doesn't mean we shouldn't try to get world leaders to end deforestation completely. At the recent UN climate summit, world leaders were able to agree on slowing down the destruction of the environment. We shouldn't expect the situation to get better before it gets worse.
We have 5 years to save the Amazon.
Facebook vows to stop selling the Amazon rainforest.
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