Amazon drought: 'We've never seen anything like this'
Amazon drought: 'We've never seen anything like this'
This year's heat and drought in the Amazon intensify worries that it is approaching a tipping point.
The Amazon is a planted forest, it is looking more and more like it will need aggressive planting to keep it healthy. We should support the indigenous Amazonian in this work for all our sake.
There's lots of evidence of domestication, cultivation, tending over the last 13,000+ years. But calling it a "planted forest" - like as if the majority of plants out in the Amazon were seeded/planted manually by humans - seems like a huge stretch.
According to this paper, about 1/5 by people
Other countries should also be looking at adding forest area and wetlands in a strategic fashion to improve freshwater retention. Deforesting clearly changes local climates. So we should be able to do the reverse as well.
Historical accounts make it sound like the vast majority of land east of the Mississippi in the US used to be old growth forest. Between the chestnut blight and over 200 years of logging, most of the old growth forest is gone.
India has had some notable successes with a grassroots movement to get rural communities to do small earthworks projects to colllect water during the rainy season and let it seep into the ground. They have demonstrated a notable reduction in crop failures during the dry season resulting from the community action.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
As the cracked and baking river bank towers up on either side of us, Oliveira Tikuna is starting to have doubts about this journey.
Bom Jesus de Igapo Grande is a community of 40 families in the middle of the forest and has been badly affected by the worst drought recorded in the region.
And the head of the village, Oliveira's father, warned anyone elderly or unwell to move closer to town, because they are dangerously far from a hospital.
This year the water in the North Atlantic has also been abnormally warm, and hot, dry air has enveloped the Amazon.
says Flávia Costa, a plant ecologist at the National Institute for Amazonian Research, who has been living and working in the rainforest for 26 years.
Dr Flávia Costa's research indicates that parts of the forest will survive - particularly those with easy access to groundwater, such as valleys.
The original article contains 1,188 words, the summary contains 149 words. Saved 87%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!