COP30 in Belém: can the Amazon still be saved?

It covers more than 6.7 million square kilometers of South America, more than twice the size of India, and is one of the richest biodiversity hotspots on the planet.

Many of these species are not found anywhere else.

Furthermore, hundreds of indigenous communities live in the region.

The Amazon River is the largest in the world, and its more than 1,100 tributaries constitute by far the largest freshwater reserve on the planet.

This water flows into the Atlantic Ocean and plays an important role in maintaining ocean currents that can influence regional and global climate systems.

Their forests are an important carbon store – the name given to natural or artificial systems that absorb more carbon than they emit, such as forests, oceans and soil – although some degraded areas emit more carbon dioxide than they store.

The destruction of large areas of forests has also made it a major supplier of timber.

Conservation organizations claim that up to 20% of the Amazon rainforest has been lost, and that a similar area has been degraded by human activities including agriculture, ranching, logging and mining – and also by drought caused by climate change and rising temperatures.

The last peak of deforestation occurred in 2022, when nearly 20,000 square kilometers of forest were cleared, an increase of 21% compared to 2021 and the worst year since 2004, according to the Amazon Andes and Amazon Monitoring Program (MAAP) of the Amazon Conservancy.

But it was soon discovered that parts of the Amazon region had suffered severe damage from which they might not recover.

Drastic increases in temperatures and prolonged droughts have affected their basic functioning, making normally humid forests drier and more vulnerable to wildfires.

“We are seeing an increase in droughts and fires, which has led to greater degradation in several parts of the Amazon,” says Paulo Brando, a professor specializing in carbon sequestration in ecosystems at Yale University in the US.

“This deterioration in different regions has become a major threat to the Amazon region.”

Here’s how the problem arises. The giant Amazon has endogenous climate systems: its forests circulate moisture from the Atlantic Ocean, creating what are known as “flying rivers” in the sky.

These atmospheric rivers first dump rain into the eastern part of the Amazon, near the Atlantic Ocean. The water then rises back into the air, soil and vegetation (through the process of evaporation), and moves westward before falling into another area of ​​the rainforest.

This circulation of water from one area of ​​rainforest to another occurs throughout the Amazon and partly explains how the vast rainforests have flourished.

But experts warn that moisture circulation has been halted.

Deforested and degraded Amazon regions cannot adequately recycle moisture from the ocean, and as a result, much less moisture returns to the atmosphere through evaporation.

He says that the most affected region is the western Amazon region, which is farthest from the Atlantic Ocean, especially southern Peru and northern Bolivia.

“The survival of the tropical forests of Peru and Bolivia actually depends on the intact forests in Brazil to the east, because if these forests are destroyed, the water cycle that creates the volatile rivers is disrupted and cannot reach the western Amazon. Everything is interconnected.”

This problem is especially serious in the dry season, from June to November.

Tropical rainforests were once highly resistant to forest fires, but in areas that have experienced low rainfall, this resistance is decreasing.

Some scientists fear that the dry rainforest ecosystem has reached a tipping point or “tipping point” from which it will not be able to recover and will be lost forever.

“These are the first signs of the turning point that we are seeing in some parts of the Amazon,” says Viner.

Erika Berenger, a senior researcher at the Ecosystems Laboratory at the University of Oxford, agrees that the risk is increasing, but, like Viner, she says some areas are more affected than others.

“It’s a very slow process that happens in certain parts,” she says.

Experts say reduced water circulation in the Amazon skies means not only a less healthy forest, but also a major impact on the Amazon and its many tributaries.

Drought conditions in 2023 and the first half of 2024 were caused in part by El Niño – a natural climate system in which sea surface temperatures rise in the eastern Pacific Ocean, affecting global precipitation patterns, especially in South America.

As if deforestation and the climate crisis were not harmful enough, illegal mining – especially gold extraction – has also caused untold damage to the rainforest ecosystem.

“And now rare earth minerals have also begun to be mined in the area,” Beringer says.

These minerals are used in electric cars, wind turbines, mobile phones and satellites, and are therefore essential to the modern economy.

“The criminal network is expanding across the Amazon region, making it very difficult for the authorities to control the situation in the territory,” says Matt Viner.

The fact that the Amazon region spans eight countries, each with its own legal and enforcement system, adds to the challenge of dealing with transnational crime.

Another potential cause for concern is the discovery of large amounts of hydrocarbons buried under the Amazon River.

According to the InfoAmazonia website, reserves equivalent to about 5.3 billion barrels of oil were discovered between 2022 and 2024.

The organization says the region contains nearly a fifth of the world’s newly discovered reserves, making it a new frontier for the fossil fuel industry.

Even before the discovery of many of these reserves and the latest research on volatile rivers, the Scientific Commission for the Amazon region showed that more than 10,000 species of plants and animals were at serious risk of extinction due to the destruction of the rainforest.

The Amazon remains a powerful carbon storehouse, capable of absorbing large amounts of the main planet-heating gas, carbon dioxide.

In 2022, it is estimated to contain 71.5 billion metric tons of carbon, both above and below ground, according to a 2024 Andean-Amazon Monitoring Program (MAAP) report.

This equates to nearly two years of global carbon dioxide emissions at 2022 levels.

But deforestation, in which plants are cut down and burned, and the impact of climate change on rainforests, threaten to turn more of the region into a net-zero emitter, scientists say.

They add that losing the Amazon would be tantamount to losing the battle against the climate crisis.

Tropical forests also produce cloud cover that reflects sunlight back into space and has a cooling effect on the planet.

As long as this continues, it will slow down the rise in global temperature.

“Just as tropical forests, such as the Amazon, have the ability to store carbon and limit global warming, they also have the ability to cool the planet,” says Tasso Azevedo, a Brazilian forest scientist and founder and coordinator of MapBiomas.

“That’s why we call the Amazon a giant air conditioner for this warming world.”

As mentioned above, the world’s largest freshwater basin has a significant impact on global climate.

Scientists say the massive dumping of fresh water into the Atlantic Ocean helps determine ocean currents, and that changes in this dumping will affect both the currents and the regional and global weather patterns they help shape.