Amazon ‘May Lose 65% of Land Biomass by 2060’
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Posted on May 10, 2013
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| CIAT International Center for Tropical Agriculture (CC BY-SA 2.0) |
By Alex Kirby, Climate News Network
This article first appeared at Climate News Network.
LONDON–There will be no winners if agriculture made possible by widespread felling in the Amazon continues to expand, say researchers from Brazil and the US.
They calculate that the large-scale expansion of agriculture at the expense of the forest could entail the loss of almost two-thirds of the Amazon’s terrestrial biomass by later this century.
Their study, published in the journal Environmental Research Letters, shows that deforestation will not only reduce the capacity of the Amazon’s natural carbon sink.
It will also cause climate feedbacks that will decrease the productivity of pasture and soybeans — the reason advanced for felling the trees in the first place.
Brazil is under intense pressure to convert the Amazon forests to produce crops and provide pasture for cattle. But the forests’ natural ecosystems sustain wild food production, maintain water and other resources, regulate climate and air quality and ameliorate the impact of infectious diseases.
The researchers are from the Brazilian federal universities of Viçosa, Pampa, Minas Gerais and the Woods Hole Research Center in the US.
They used model simulations to assess how the agricultural yield of the Amazon would be affected under two different land-use scenarios: one, business-as-usual, where recent deforestation trends continue and new protected areas are not created; and the other a governance scenario, which assumes Brazilian environmental legislation is implemented.
They predict that by 2050 a decrease in precipitation caused by deforestation will reduce pasture productivity by 30% in the governance scenario and by 34% in the business-as-usual scenario.
They say increasing temperatures could cause a reduction in soybean yield by 24% in the governance scenario and by 28% under the business-as-usual scenario.
It is significant that the study finds relatively little difference between the outcomes of the two scenarios, perhaps suggesting that Brazil needs to tighten its environmental legislation drastically and to enforce it more effectively.
Perhaps the authors’ starkest conclusion (but see our story of 11 March) is
This article originally appeared on : TruthDig