The Amazon forest is alarmingly sensitive to reduced rainfall, a comprehensive analysis of an unusual drought in 2005 has shown.
The study provides the first evidence that Amazonia could release vast amounts of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere if climate change produced hotter, drier weather in the region.
Participants at a scientific conference held in Copenhagen in March were shocked to hear new, much higher estimates for likely sea-level rise and rainforest loss that could lead to trees emitting more carbon than they store.
OSLO - Amazonian forests may be less vulnerable to dying off from global warming than feared because many projections underestimate rainfall, a study showed.
The report, by scientists in Britain, said Brazil and other nations in the region would also have to act to help avert any irreversible drying of the eastern Amazon, the region most at risk from climate change, deforestation and fires.
As more and more multibillion-dollar projects for sequestering carbon dioxide (CO2) deep within the Earth seek financial support, human-formed fertile black soils in the Amazon basin suggest a cheaper, lower-tech route toward the same destination.
food safety China lists illegal additives China has come out with its first official compilation of 17 illegal food additives used in the country. The banned substances include boric acid, commonly used as an insecticide but also mixed with noodles and meatballs to increase elasticity, and industrial formaldehyde, used in making soap and drains cleaner but also used as a common
Wetlands perform many essential ecosystem services—carbon storage, flood control, maintenance of biodiversity, fish production, and aquifer recharge, among others—services that have increasingly important global consequences. Like biodiversity hotspots and frontier forests, the world’s largest wetlands are now mapped and described by an international team of scientists, highlighting their conservation importance at the global scale. We explore current understanding of some ecosystem services wetlands provide.
More destructive hurricanes, shrinking forests, melting glaciers, disappearing animals: the prospective damage to Latin America and the Caribbean from climate change makes for grim reading. A new World Bank report, timed to coincide with a United Nations conference in Poland, tries to put numbers to the potential economic cost.
