The Amazon giants become even greater.
A new radical study revealed that the largest trees in the tropical forest are not only holding their terrain, but they prosper – multiplying, multiplying in number and continuing to play a major role in the attenuation of the impacts of climate change.
There has been an expansion of 3.3% in large trees per decade, noted scientists, after having followed the changes in 188 intact forest plots across the Amazon in the past 30 years.
Led by nearly 100 researchers from 60 universities in Brazil, the United Kingdom and elsewhere, the results were published Thursday in the journal Nature Plants.
The authors have attributed growth to the increasing quantity of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere of combustion of gas, petroleum and coal.
The document was welcomed as proof of forest resilience in the face of climate change, but scientists have warned that these large trees remain vulnerable as droughts, lightning and fires increase in frequency, while deforestation continues to constitute a serious threat.
There was an understanding that large trees should “be vulnerable to climate change”, said Adriane Esquivel-Muelbert, one of the main authors of the study on Saturday in NBC News during a telephone interview. “What we see here is actually, they seem to show a whole resilience.”
“We do not see signs of their death,” said Esquivel-Muelbert, who co-wrote the study while she was at British University of Birmingham but has since moved to the neighboring University of Cambridge. “They also increase in size and number.”
Scientists have pointed out that, even if the protection of intact forest areas was essential to stabilize the climate, the Amazon cannot compensate for the large amount of carbon dioxide produced worldwide by cars, factories and power plants – and it remains threatened.
The tropical forest is a carbon well, which means that it stores more carbon than it produces. Pushing the tropical forest beyond its limit could accelerate climate change and have terrible consequences for local communities, including indigenous groups that depend on it.
Esquivel-Muelbert stressed that it was difficult to predict how the worsening climate change would have an impact in the future, and hesitated to say that an increase in CO2 has benefited the forest, the warning can ensure that the largest trees become more exposed to other factors such as drought.
“We don’t know the long-term consequences,” she said.
Other factors, including deforestation, remain a colossal risk for the health of the Amazon.
Growing trees is, in some respects, a “positive news,” said Rebecca Banbury Morgan, principal author of the University of Bristol. But that also means that the forest is now “more vulnerable to the loss of these trees”.
“Although we have shown that intact forest trees are still increasing in size, all the advantages of this in terms of carbon wells can be quite easily canceled by deforestation and impacts of logging, so the preservation of these intact forests is really a priority,” she told NBC News.
Forest fires, deforestation and global warming could permanently destroy the water cycle which supports parts of the Amazonian forest if action is not taken in the coming decades, according to a distinct study published last year in nature.
The study suggested that 10% to 47% of the landscape may go away from the tropical forest by 2050 if global warming and deforestation rates are not considerably hampered.
The Brazil Congress approved a bill in 2023 to soften environmental licenses to open a highway that cuts to the heart of the Amazon, and near one of the last regions which still has large virgin forest areas.
The loss of a large part of the Amazon could transform a key carbon well into a source of emissions, because forest fires are burning and plants and animals decompose, are no longer able to survive.
