Permanent damage to one of the world’s most important ecosystems could potentially be at a point of no return.
After droughts and a significant number of world fires, the most in 14 years, Andrew Miller, advocacy director at Amazon Watch, told the AP last week that we could be at a tipping point that could see irreversible damage to the Amazon Rainforest.
“could be ominous indicators that we are reaching the long-feared ecological tipping point.”
“Humanity’s window of opportunity to reverse this trend is shrinking, but still open,” Miller said.
Common Dreams notes that Amazon stores 150-200 tons of carbon while carrying 20 percent of the world’s freshwater out to sea. With its continued destruction and the release of that carbon into the atmosphere, the world could see further changes to weather patterns, agricultural production, and food supplies across the planet, as mentioned by the World Economic Forum.
“it will release billions of tonnes of CO2 into the atmosphere through fires and plants dying off. This would further exacerbate climate change and make the 1.5°C goal impossible to achieve. It would also alter weather patterns, which would impact agricultural productivity and global food supplies.”
However, there is some good news.
After the ouster of far-right President Jair Bolsonaro, deforestation was down in 2024 across Brazil and Colombia. This was an incredibly encouraging trend after deforestation saw a 15-year high only a few years ago. In fact, forest loss within Brazil alone dropped 30.6% from the previous year.
Obviously, there’s still more work that needs to be done, especially if the theories of irreversible damage to this important aspect of the planet prove to be true.
