AMAZON
RAINFOREST - GEOGRAPHY
News: Severe drought grips the Amazon
rainforest: The impact, cause and grim future
What's
in the news?
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The Amazon rainforest is reeling from an
intense drought. Numerous rivers vital for travel have dried up.
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As a result, there is no water, food, or
medicine in villages of Indigenous communities living in the area.
Key
takeaways:
●
The Rio
Negro, one of the world’s largest rivers by discharge levels, has fallen to
a record low level of 13.59 metres near the city of Manaus.
Amazon
rainforests:
●
The Amazon rainforest or Amazonia
constitutes close to 1.3% of the
planet’s surface and 4.1% of the earth’s land surface, but as a biome, the
Amazon is host to 10% of the world’s wildlife species and some more, as we are
still discovering new species in this epic mass of life in Latin America.
●
Some of the species found in the Amazon
are not found anywhere else.
●
The Amazon
itself is the largest river by volume of water in the world, draining from
Iquitos in Peru, across Brazil and discharging into the Atlantic Ocean.
Countries
with Amazon rainforests:
●
60% of it is in Brazil, 13% is in Peru, 8%
in Bolivia, 7% and 6% respectively in Colombia and Venezuela, and nearly 3%
each in Guyana and Suriname and around 1% in French Guiana and Ecuador.
Ecological
significance:
●
Amazon rainforest covers approximately
eight million square kilometres — an area larger than Australia — and is home
to an astounding amount of biodiversity.
●
It helps balance the global carbon budget
by absorbing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere (lungs of the earth) and plays a key role in the global water
cycle, stabilizing global climate and rainfall.
●
In all, by storing around 76 billion tonnes of carbon, the Amazon rainforest
helps stabilise the world’s climate.
●
Moisture from the Amazon is responsible
for rainfall for many parts of Latin America, contributing to agriculture,
storage of water in urban reservoirs as well.
Deforestation
in Amazon rainforests:
●
The carbon emissions from the Amazon increased by 117 percent in 2020
compared to the annual average for 2010 to 2018.
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Deforestation is pushing it dangerously
close to a “tipping point”, beyond
which trees would die off and release their carbon stores back into the
atmosphere, with catastrophic consequences for the climate.
●
Brazil,
which holds around 60 percent of the Amazon, has pledged to eradicate illegal
deforestation by 2030.
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Deforestation has already wiped out around
one-fifth of the rainforest.
Savannization:
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If 20% or 25% of the forest is destroyed,
the forest will enter a process of savannization and that would represent the
death of the forest.