A year ago, Carlos Nobre, one of Brazil’s top climate scientists, was a rare voice of optimism about the planet’s future.
The 73-year-old, one of the top experts on the Amazon rainforest, hailed at a summit in northern Brazil that “for the first time, all leaders in the region have been mobilized to find solutions for the forest” .
Today he warns that the world’s largest jungle, ravaged by the worst drought-induced forest fires in decades, is in existential danger.
The world risks “losing the Amazon,” he told AFP in an interview.
A record wave of wildfires, fueled by severe drought linked to climate change and deforestation, is causing devastation across South America.
Brazil’s worst drought in recent history has fueled the country’s biggest fires in more than a decade, engulfing up to 80 percent of the country in smoke.
Although several countries, including Canada, regularly experience catastrophic wildfires, they are often the result of naturally occurring lightning strikes that spread quickly through dry vegetation, Nobre said.
In the Amazon, on the other hand, most fires are started illegally by people for agricultural purposes.
“The criminals realized that satellites only detect fires if the fire spreads to 30 or 40 square meters (320 to 430 square feet).
“This gives them time to leave the area before they are arrested,” Nobre said.
– Not linear –
In February, the European climate monitor Copernicus announced that for the first time in history, the Earth had experienced 12 consecutive months of temperatures 1.5 degrees Celsius higher than in pre-industrial times – four years earlier than predicted.
Experts had warned that extreme weather events would accelerate sharply with warming of 1.5 degrees Celsius.
“It’s not a slow, linear increase,” Nobre said.
“By 2024, we are already seeing the frequency of extreme events increasing and breaking records,” he added, citing increased “heat waves, heavy rains, droughts, forest fires” among the extreme weather events that are frequent in some parts of the world . planet.
– From jungle to savannah? –
Nobre warned that the fires devastating parts of the Amazon risked accelerating the transition to dry savannah grasslands.
“If global warming continues and we do not completely stop deforestation, degradation and fires, we will be past the point of no return by 2050,” he warned.
“In 30 to 50 years we will have lost at least 50 percent of the forest,” he said.
An increase in warming to 2.5 degrees Celsius by 2050 would trigger new tipping points, he said, including “outright losing the Amazon.”
Among the measures he advocated to combat climate warming were accelerating the transition to renewable energy and mass planting of trees in cities to act as a sponge for carbon dioxide.
Trees can help reduce urban temperatures by up to 4.5 degrees Celsius and also increase humidity.
“City sponges are a very important solution all over the world.”
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