Prime Considerations

The Amazon rainforest is home to more than 10% of the planet's terrestrial wildlife. It's also currently a carbon 'sink' (store) with a capacity equivalent to 15-20 years of global 'greenhouse gas' emissions. We really can't afford to lose it. A paper in the journal Nature, however, predicts that large sections of the Amazon will reach a 'tipping point' by 2050 (https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2024/feb/14/amazon-rainforest-could-reach-tipping-point-by-2050-scientists-warn). A 'tipping point' is, of course, a state, where changes are impossible to reverse. They often develop a momentum of their own. The Amazon is currently threatened by a combination of global heating; changing rainfall; longer dry seasons; deforestation (to take timber but also to clear land for cattle and/or grow soya cattle feed) and fires. The loss of large sections of the Amazon would be simultaneously a biodiversity and a climate disaster!