(https://www.france24.com/en/20200304-amazon-african-forests-turning-from-co2-sink-to-source-study)
>The world's tropical forests are rapidly losing their ability to absorb carbon dioxide from greenhouse gas emissions, with the Amazon rainforest at risk of turning from carbon sink to source within 15 years, researchers warned Wednesday.
Tropical forests provide humans with medicine, food, shelter and water and currently account for around half of all terrestrial carbon absorption.
But they are rapidly getting saturated as manmade emissions continue to climb year on year.
Forests act as a carbon sink when the amount of carbon retrieved through photosynthesis outweighs that emitted by tree loss -- be that through fire, drought or deforestation.
But the rate of forest decline varies throughout the world, with the Amazon's absorption ability dropping far faster than the tropical forests of sub-Saharan Africa.
In the Amazon, the forest's carbon sink capacity is predicted to reach zero by 2035.
>"This decrease is decades ahead of what even the most pessimistic climate models predicted," said Wannes Hubau, a forest ecosystems expert at Belgium's Royal Museum for Central Africa.
>"Mortality is a natural part of the cycle of forest trees. However, by pumping so much CO2 in the air, we have accelerated this cycle and blew its magnitude up to unknown proportions," he told AFP.
Despite evidence that in particular the Amazon has been losing its carbon sink ability for decades, several of the emissions reductions scenarios envisioned in the Paris climate deal assume forests will be able to suck CO2 from the atmosphere over the long term.
Several countries have announced plans to plant more trees and many larger companies plan mass-scale afforestation schemes to offset their carbon emissions.
>The world's tropical forests are rapidly losing their ability to absorb carbon dioxide from greenhouse gas emissions, with the Amazon rainforest at risk of turning from carbon sink to source within 15 years, researchers warned Wednesday.
Tropical forests provide humans with medicine, food, shelter and water and currently account for around half of all terrestrial carbon absorption.
But they are rapidly getting saturated as manmade emissions continue to climb year on year.
Forests act as a carbon sink when the amount of carbon retrieved through photosynthesis outweighs that emitted by tree loss -- be that through fire, drought or deforestation.
But the rate of forest decline varies throughout the world, with the Amazon's absorption ability dropping far faster than the tropical forests of sub-Saharan Africa.
In the Amazon, the forest's carbon sink capacity is predicted to reach zero by 2035.
>"This decrease is decades ahead of what even the most pessimistic climate models predicted," said Wannes Hubau, a forest ecosystems expert at Belgium's Royal Museum for Central Africa.
>"Mortality is a natural part of the cycle of forest trees. However, by pumping so much CO2 in the air, we have accelerated this cycle and blew its magnitude up to unknown proportions," he told AFP.
Despite evidence that in particular the Amazon has been losing its carbon sink ability for decades, several of the emissions reductions scenarios envisioned in the Paris climate deal assume forests will be able to suck CO2 from the atmosphere over the long term.
Several countries have announced plans to plant more trees and many larger companies plan mass-scale afforestation schemes to offset their carbon emissions.
