Alert for Earth’s lungs: Amazon rainforest will be evanished by 2064

Climate change is unequivocally one of the greatest threats to our planet, being more severe revealing itself in the forms of heat waves, rising sea levels, melting glaciers and more. It appears that this major threat is also culpable for the Amazon rainforest becoming barren.

A professor of geography at the University of Florida predicts that the Amazon, known as Earth’s lungs, will collapse due to climate change and deforestation by 2064.

“The best way to think of the forest ecosystem is that it’s a pump,” Robert Walker told UPI. “The forest recycles moisture, which supports regional rainfall. If you continue to destroy the forest, the rainfall amount drops … and eventually, you wreck the pump,” he said.

Reuters photo

Amazon rainforest under threat

The Amazon covers over 5.5 million square kilometres, being the world’s largest tropical rainforest. It, however, has shrunk by about 20 percent since intense development began, according to Walker.

Reporting the people’s view who live in the Amazon region on the environment, he continued: “The people there, they don’t worry so much about biodiversity, the environment, when they have to worry about eating their next meal.”

Walker also criticized Brazil’s President Jair Bolsonaro over forest’s demise.

“The upshot is that the deforestation rate has begun to rise, if slowly, after reaching its historic low point in 2012,” Walker wrote in the paper, noting that Bolsonaro’s administration “appears intent on scrapping all remaining restraints on the unfettered exploitation of Amazonia’s natural resources.”

Robert Walker’s forecast regarind the Amazon rainforest published in the journal Environment.

Additional information: Ten countries with the largest forest area in 2020 (in million hectares), per Statista.

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