‘Amazon emitted more CO2 than it absorbed’

A boy jumps over logs seized by the Amazon Military Police on the Manacapuru river in Brazil. Pic/AFP

The Brazilian Amazon released nearly 20 per cent more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere over the last decade than it absorbed, according to a report that shows humanity can no longer depend on the world's largest tropical forest to help absorb man-made carbon pollution.

From 2010 through 2019, Brazil's Amazon basin gave off 16.6 billion tonnes of CO2, while drawing down only 13.9 billion tonnes, researchers reported in the journal Nature Climate Change.

"We half-expected it, but it is the first time that we have figures showing that the Brazilian Amazon has flipped, and is now a net emitter," said co-author Jean-Pierre Wigneron, a scientist at France's National Institute for Agronomic Research.

"We don't know at what point the changeover could become irreversible," he said. The study also showed that deforestation increased nearly four-fold in 2019 compared to either of the two previous years, from about one million hectares to 3.9 million hectares, an area the size of the Netherlands.

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