The Future of the Amazon Forest: Trends and Debates

Abstract

ABSTRACT The Amazon forest has been said to be in imminent danger of dramatic dieback due to the combined threats of climate change and deforestation. The Amazon forest itself is a major carbon store area, and carbon dioxide release from deforestation or forest degradation may strongly contribute to overall future carbon concentrations in the atmosphere, thus increasing global warming. Some authors have suggested the possibility of a catastrophic savannisation of the forest in a relatively short time due to the combination of several processes. This paper, based on available data and scientific results, and the climate projections produced by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), examines the evidence about past and current deforestation trends and about impacts upon the Amazon of expected climate changes, and concludes that rates of gross deforestation (covering all conversions of forest into non-forest areas) are much lower than previously thought and rapidly decreasing, and that net deforestation rates are even lower once account is taken of the increasing importance of planted forests and the part of deforestation occurring in secondary regrowth. Rates of deforestation (especially deforestation of primary forest) are expected to continue being low and declining. Catastrophic forecasts of rapid Amazon rainforest 'die-back' or savannisation, resting on the hypothesis of decreasing moisture in the Amazon basin, are also shown to lack sufficient scientific basis and to be not supported by IPCC climate projections, especially when such outcomes are predicted to occur in a few decades or during this century.