A team of European and African scientists, led by the University of Leeds in the UK, surveyed many pristine tropical forests that have not been affected much by humans.
The team surveyed more than 300,000 trees over 30 years in 565 forests in the Amazon and Africa. Scientists tagged individual trees with aluminum spikes, measured their diameters, and estimated their heights. Over several years, the team repeated the process and calculated how much carbon each tree stored.
As a result, scientists recorded that the amount of carbon absorbed by these forests was nearly 3 times lower than the amount recorded in the 1990s. More seriously, the group outlined future scenarios and showed that these forests are at risk of losing their ability to absorb CO2by 2035. This could cause the Amazon rainforest to transform from the Earth's "green lungs" into a carbon source from the 2060s if forest fires and deforestation remain uncontrolled.
Many locations in Africa are in a similar situation. For example, the Congo Basin region in central Africa has shown signs of declining carbon absorption since early 2010. The team believes that in 10 years, African forests will absorb CO214% less than present.
"Tropical forests will exacerbate the problem of climate change," said Simon Lewis, an ecologist at the University of Leeds.
The figure given by this research group is much earlier than the figures of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and some government organizations, which said that it will take many centuries for the tropical rainforest in the Congo Basin to lose its ability to absorb CO2.2.
The main cause of this situation is believed to be the impact of extreme phenomena such as drought in Africa causing high temperatures and frequent deforestation in the Amazon region.
"We see that the most worrying aspects of climate change have already begun. This is a decade of extreme events around the world," Mr. Lewis added.
Currently, many hopes are placed on the UN climate negotiations taking place in November this year, in which many countries are expected to propose plans to balance energy before 2050. Countries with potential such as the US, or many large corporations, also have plans to reduce emissions through increased conservation, reforestation or new forest planting.
.jpg.jpg)
