More bad news on the climate front, and thus, more reason to step up the pressure on the likes of Donald Trump, Scott Morrison, Jair Bolsanaro to act urgently—a new study shows that the ability of tropical forests to soak up carbon emissions is falling. They will soon no longer be ‘carbon sinks’, and this portends an accelerated climate crisis. Indeed, the Amazonian rainforests could soon become a source of emission, given the Bolsanaro-supported logging and degradation for farming. This means the room for emissions could shrink drastically, which, in effect, means that developing and least developed nations could find it incredibly difficult—in fact, impossible—to lift their people out of poverty through growth, which largely remains hydrocarbon-energy fuelled today.
The study, with inputs from nearly 100 scientific institutions, says that the amount of carbon absorbed by the world’s intact tropical forests has fallen by a third from the 1990s—thanks to higher temperatures, droughts, and deforestation. This threat will only grow exponentially, with deteriorating effects of climate change, and increased exploitation, turning tropical forests into a carbon source by the 2060s. It is now, more than ever, important to call out talk of forests offsetting climate change—in the 1990s, these forests sucked out 17% of the emissions from human activity against the current 6%—often forwarded to scale back climate action goals. Climate scientists’ fears of “tipping points” that doom the Earth to apocalyptic global heating may already be getting realised.
