Scientists Explore Potential Of Amazon Forest As Net Carbon Source

[hatrack]

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"Satellite reconnaissance showed that 600 fires were started in the Amazon region each day on average last year, the Brazilian government reports. The rate of destruction has almost doubled in the past decade, to 23,400sqkm over 12 months of 2003-2004 – an area about the size of Belgium.

Forest is being destroyed by cattle ranchers, by landless peasants slashing and burning to create cropland, by illegal lumbering, and increasingly by large agribusinesses planting lucrative soybean. The fires seen everywhere from the air outside Santarem, a rough-edged town 800km up the Amazon from the Atlantic, were mostly set to create giant fields for soy. The government’s own plans to pave 3,360km of additional road through the wilderness could lead to clearing of up to 182,000 sqkm of forest over 30 years, it was estimated by Fearnside’s Amazon Environmental Research Institute. Judging from experience, “paving increases the deforestation rate in a strip along the highway, to a depth of 50km on each side,’’ said Fearnside.

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Worldwide deforestation is now believed to contribute under 20% of manmade emissions of carbon dioxide, said Artaxo, of Brazil’s University of Sao Paulo. And the Amazon forest is believed to remain a “sink’’ still absorbing slightly more carbon than it emits. But scientists say the feedback loops of a warming world might change that picture in mere decades. For one thing, computer modeling foresees a warmer Pacific Ocean stirring more frequent and intense El Ninos, the climate phenomenon that tends to dry the eastern Amazon. Rising temperatures themselves would also help dry vegetation. In addition, deforested terrain sends less moisture – via plants’ “evapotranspiration’’ – into the air to fall as rain. Dead trees then add more carbon dioxide to the atmosphere, further heightening warming in a destructive cycle.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a United Nations-organised science network, concluded in its latest assessment that the remaining Amazon “is threatened by the combination of human disturbance, increases in fire frequency and scale, and decreased precipitation from evapotranspiration loss, global warming, and El Nino.’’ Much more remains to be learned, even including how much “biomass’’ an average hectare contains in this highly diverse forest – a number crucial to knowing how much carbon a dying forest would release.

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http://thestar.com.my/lifestyle/story.asp?file=/2005/3/8/features/10160395&sec=features

[NNadir]

1. It is interesting that soybeans are a potential fuel oil crop.

I have grown to like biodiesel, but this is too much.