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WORLDWIDE
FOREST/BIODIVERSITY CAMPAIGN NEWS
Dire
Amazon Rainforest Predictions
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Forest
Networking a Project of Ecological Enterprises
http://forests.org/ -- Forest
Conservation Archives
http://forests.org/web/ -- 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/
g.b.
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TEXT STARTS HERE:
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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