Climate change largely contributed to the devastating drought that hit the Amazon in 2023, one of the most important ecosystems in the world for stabilizing the global climate threatened by warming.
The historic agricultural drought has affected millions of people across the Amazon basin, stoking massive wildfires, shrinking major waterways and wreaking catastrophic havoc on wildlife.
Some experts have suggested that the arrival of the natural weather phenomenon El Niño was the cause of the powder keg conditions. But a new study by scientists at the World Weather Attribution (WWA), published on Wednesday, reveals that climate change caused by carbon pollution emitted by the planet was the main culprit.
They say this phenomenon has made drought 30 times more likely from June to November 2023. And they warned the situation will only get worse as the climate warms, pushing the Amazon towards a “tipping point” climatic.
Scientists fear that climate change and deforestation combined will intensify the drying and warming of the Amazon. They say this would trigger an accelerated transition from rainforest to savannah and reduce its capacity to store carbon.
The Amazon is estimated to store more than 100 billion tonnes of carbon in its trees and soils, more than twice the world’s annual emissions from all sources.
“The Amazon could make or break our fight against climate change,” said Regina Rodrigues, professor of physical oceanography and climate at the Federal University of Santa Catarina.
“Tipping point”
“If we protect the forest, it will continue to act as the world’s largest terrestrial carbon sink.” “But if we allow human-caused emissions and deforestation to pass the tipping point, it will release large amounts of carbon dioxide and make our fight against climate change even more difficult,” she explains.
Drought conditions in the Amazon basin have been caused since mid-2023 by low precipitation and high temperatures. River levels have been drastically reduced, devastating a region that relies on its labyrinth of waterways for transportation and basic needs. Harvests were poor, causing shortages of food and drinking water. Very high water temperatures are also linked to the deaths of around 150 dolphins in the space of a week in a lake in the Brazilian Amazon.
To study the role that climate change may have played in the drought, scientists used weather data and computer model simulations. They compared the current climate — taking a temperature increase of about 1.2 degrees Celsius since the pre-industrial era — with the situation before global warming. Finding: Climate change has made low precipitation 10 times more likely and agricultural drought about 30 times more likely.
And if drought is currently a once-in-50-year event, with global warming of 2°C, the Amazon would suffer from these conditions approximately every 13 years, they warned.
“This result is very worrying,” said Friederike Otto, lecturer in climate science at the Grantham Institute at Imperial College London. “Climate change and deforestation are already destroying some of the world’s most important ecosystems.”
And to summarize: “Our choices in the fight against climate change remain the same in 2024: either continue to destroy lives and livelihoods by burning fossil fuels, or ensure a healthy and livable future by quickly replacing them with clean and renewable energies.