Subject: Dire Amazon Rainforest Predictions
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Forest Networking a Project of Ecological Enterprises
http://forests.org/.org/cse/html/dte/ -- Forest Conservation Archives
http://forests.org/web//cse/html/dte/ -- Discuss Forest Conservation
11/12/98
OVERVIEW & COMMENTARY by EE
The Amazon, a monstrously large and important planetary ecosystem
engine, is sick, and its continued existence in doubt. Following are
two reports. We have to do something, what? Come and have your say
at http://forests.org/amazonweb/tml/dte/ Just do something!
g.b.
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ITEM #1
Title: Amazon Flames -- CO2 Emissions UP
Source: Wood Hole Research Center
Status: Distribute freely properly accredited to source
Date: November 11, 1998
[The following is being distributed on behalf of colleagues at the
Woods Hole Research Center and IPAM - Instituto de Pesquisa Ambiental
da amazonia]
Contact Information:
Adriana Moreira
Woods Hole Research Center
+55 61 3409992 (in Brazil)
Email adriana@whrc.org
Information Bulletin for the Buenos Aires Conference
Flames in the Amazon forest: carbon emissions go up.
In May of 1998, researchers of the Instituto de Pesquisa Ambiental da
Amazonia (IPAM), a non- governmental research institute based in
Bel?m, Brazil, and the Woods Hole Research Center (WHRC), based in
Massachusetts, predicted that approximately 400,000 km2 of forest in
the Brazilian Amazon would become vulnerable to fire during the 1998
dry season. A recent update of this fire prediction model, using
additional rainfall data collected across the region, shows that the
unusually low amounts of rainfall in 1998 have increased the area of
fire-vulnerable fire to more than one million square kilometers, or
one third of the forests of Amazonia. These researchers calculate
that more one half of this drought-stressed forest (700,000 km2) had
depleted all available soil water to five meters depth by the end of
September!
In the first field study conducted to test this prediction, these
researchers measured the amount of fire-vulnerable forest that
actually caught fire in a small test region in southeastern Amazonia.
They discovered that three to five thousand square kilometers of
standing forest caught fire in 1998 in this region. This area of
burned forest is one-fifth the size of the entire forest area that is
"deforested" through clear-cutting and burning each year (average is
~19,000 km2/yr), as measured by the Brazilian Government's very
important deforestation monitoring program. 1/ And yet, the burned
forests were documented within a very small (45,000 km2) region that
is less than one percent of the legal Amazon (5,000,000 km2). The
burning of standing forests is not currently included in the
government's monitoring program.
The study was conducted in September, 1998, in a 300 x 150 km area
that extends from Marab south to Reden?ao, Par State, in the
southeastern corner of Brazil's "arc of deforestation", near the edge
of the Amazon forest. This estimate is based upon 1,110 observations
made from a low-flying airplane along an 800 km flight path that
criss-crossed the region, combined with field visits to burned and
unburned forests. Forests in which ash was observed on the ground, or
in which leaves were scorched brown from flames, were recorded as
burned. Burned forests were recorded at 9% of the observation points.
Although this study was conducted in a region that is highly prone to
forest fires because of severe drought, these results are of major
significance for estimates of human damages to Amazon forests, and of
carbon emissions from Amazon forests associated with land use
practices. According to recent field studies2/, the burning of
standing forest can release 10 to 80% of forest biomass to the
atmosphere as heat- trapping carbon dioxide. Therefore, the forest
fires such as those observed between Marab and Redenao release large
amounts of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere that are not included in
current estimates of carbon emissions from Amazonia. Contrary to
media reports, there have been hundreds of Amazon forest fires in
1998.
Footnotes
1. Amazonia: Desflorestamento 1995-1997. INPE/IBAMA. 1998
(http:\\www.inpe.br)
2 Holdsworth, A. R. and C. Uhl. 1997. Fire in Amazonian selectively
logged rain forest and the potential for fire reduction. Ecological
Applications 7 (2): 713-725.
Cochrane, M. A. and M. D. Schulze. In press. Fire as a recurrent event
in tropical forests of the eastern Amazon: effects on forest
structure, biomass, and species composition. Biotropica.
ITEM #2
Title: Amazon forest 'will be dead in 50 years' 'probably
unstoppable'
Source: http://www.independent.co.uk/stories/A0311806.html
Status: Distribute freely properly accredited to source
Date: November 11, 1998
Byline: By Michael McCarthy, Environment Correspondent
The British government yesterday predicted the death of the Amazon
rainforest in 50 years' time - and a resultant surge in global
warming.
The disappearance of the Amazon forest is probably unstoppable because
of the climate change already occurring, according to the UK's latest
computer models of the climate.
Temperatures up to seven degrees higher than today and decreases in
rainfall of up to 50 centimetres a year will kill off vast areas of
what is now lush tropical forest, the world's richest wildlife
habitat, and turn it into grassland or even desert.
But even more critically, the Amazon and other forested regions will
be transformed from areas which now absorb carbon dioxide, the
principal gas causing global warming, into areas which give it out.
The result will be an enormous and relatively sudden increase in the
amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, perhaps more than 50 per
cent, and a rapid or even runaway escalation of climate change in a
"positive feedback loop" - global warming causing more global warming.
The predictions, some of the direst yet, were unveiled yesterday by
the Environment minister, Michael Meacher, to coincide with the
opening of the two-week conference in Buenos Aires, Argentina, which
will try to carry forward last year's Kyoto climate change treaty.
"They make frightening reading," Mr Meacher said.
They come from Britain's latest supercomputer model of the global
climate at the Meteorological Office's Hadley Centre for Climate
Research in Bracknell, Berkshire, and five associated models of areas
of potential impact - food production, water supplies, flood risk,
human health and natural vegetation cover.
The predictions about Brazil come from the natural vegetation model
run by the Institute of Terrestrial Ecology (ITE) in Edinburgh. This
is the first time anyone has put a date on the death of the Amazon
rainforest, and it suggests a very rapid end.
"The ecosystem model predicts that [forest] dieback will occur over
vast areas of northern Brazil, beginning in the 2040s," the government
report says. "After 2050, and as a result of vegetation dieback and
change, primarily in Amazonia, Europe and North America, the
terrestrial land surface becomes a source of carbon, releasing
approximately 2 billion tonnes of carbon per year into the
atmosphere."
At the moment the trees are absorbing between two and three billion
tonnes of carbon dioxide a year - nearly half the amount that is
released from man-made sources.
"It is absolutely essential that world-wide political action is taken,
going further than Kyoto to arrest and ultimately reverse this
process," Mr Meacher said.
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