Scientists warn that 10% of the Amazon has a high risk of being converted into a drier and degraded ecosystem by 2050, while 47% has a moderate transitional risk.

The article, published in Nature, used evidence collected by field researchers who are already witnessing changes in the rainforest as a response to increasing temperatures, extreme droughts, fires and deforestation.
These regional tipping points may lead to a systemic breakdown of the biome unless humanity controls global warming, stops deforestation and starts to recover degraded parts of the rainforest, the authors say.
The possibility of the Amazon reaching a tipping point, after which it would no longer sustain itself as a rainforest, has been discussed since the 1990s when the first articles addressing the issue were published by the scientists Carlos Nobre and Thomas Lovejoy. Since then, other researchers have analyzed the topic with important progress, including the 2018 emblematic study that delimited a 20-25% deforestation threshold after which the tipping point would be inevitable. As of now, 13% of the biome has already been lost, according to the Monitoring of the Andean Amazon Project (MAAP), a U.S.-based nonprofit.

Now, a group of 24 scientists has taken an important step in trying to predict not only when, but also how these major changes would happen in such a complex landscape. “The first tipping point papers used relatively simple transition models that related temperature, rainfall, climate and forest,” Gilberto Câmara, former Director of INPE, Brazil’s space research agency, told Mongabay in a video call. “It is like if I tell you, ‘I’m in New York and I can go to Washington,’ without telling me how you’re going to get there. The original articles were like teleportation. This article is already an attempt to tell you what routes there are,” he said.

The research, published by Nature magazine on Feb. 14, used field evidence and disturbance factors such as roads, temperature and extreme drought events to point to the stretches of the rainforest more susceptible to converting into another landscape. To evaluate how climate change could affect the course of events, the authors used prediction models from the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

They concluded that 10% of the biome has a relatively high potential to transition to a drier, degraded and less biodiverse ecosystem, which no longer could be considered a tropical forest. These areas are mainly in Guyana, Venezuela, Colombia and Peru. Moreover, 47% of the biome has a moderate transition potential, including relatively remote parts of the central Amazon. READ FURTHER from the source