Amazon rainforest struggling to recover from drought
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By: Jonathan Watts
May 20, 2024
More than a third of the Amazon rainforest is struggling to recover from drought, according to a new study that warns of a “critical slowing down” of this globally important ecosystem.
The signs of weakening resilience raise concerns that the world’s greatest tropical forest – and biggest terrestrial carbon sink – is degrading towards a point of no return.
It follows four supposedly “one-in-a-century” dry spells in less than 20 years, highlighting how a human-disrupted climate is putting unusually intense strains on trees and other plants, many of which are dying of dehydration.
In the past, the canopy of the South American tropical forest, which covers an area equivalent to about half of Europe, would shrink and expand in tandem with the annual dry and rainy seasons. It also had the capacity to bounce back from a single drought.
But in recent times, recoveries have become more sluggish because droughts are growing more intense in the south-east of the Amazon and more frequent in the north-west.
The new paper, published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, examines satellite images of vegetation activity from 2001 to 2019. Tens of thousands of pixels, each covering a 25-sq km (9.65-sq mile) area, were analysed on a month-by-month basis and correlated with local rainfall data.
The authors’ goal was to investigate how “the frequency, intensity, or duration of droughts contributes to stability loss of Amazon vegetation”.
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