The rainforest is safer than we thought.
A new study of tropical forests in Central America, Asia, Africa and Amazonia shows that global warming will not cause the devastation to the biome previously expected.
Tropical rainforests have the most biodiversity of any type of biome, and are therefore of great importance to science. The forests are also delicate ecosystems, and scientists believed that rainforests were the most vulnerable to climate change.
But new research suggests that rainforests might be more resilient than we thought. The study simulated what effect “business-as-usual emissions” would have on tropical forests up to 2100, specifically the emissions’ effect on locked up carbon. The researchers then compared these results to 22 global climate models, as well as land-surface process models. And in all but one of these simulations, rainforests in all four regions retained their carbon stock, even though carbon dioxide levels rose throughout the hypothetical century.
The research shows “robust evidence for the resilience of tropical rainforests,” Chris Huntingford told Nature. Huntingford is a climate modeller for the UK’s Center for Ecology and Hydrology in Wallingford, UK.
The one model that did predict biomass loss in the Amazon (and the Central American rainforests) is called HadCM3. This model, developed by the UK Met Office’s Hadley Center in Exeter, UK, was the basis for previous predictions that the rainforest would lose massive amounts of biomass. Unlike the other models, the basis for this prediction was that global warming would cause large scale drying in the Amazon basin, but new data and improved modeling show that the drying will, most likely, not occur.
“This has been a big issue in science for many years,” Daniel Nepstad, forest ecologist at the Amazon Environmental Research Institute in San Francisco, told Nature, “and the emerging view is that there is less sensitivity in tropical forests for climate-driven dieback.”
Of course, this does not mean that the rainforest is completely safe from environmental peril, as logging is still a major concern for the biome.
