Amazon Forests Slower Regrowth – New Study Findings states that the regrowth of Amazon forests following deforestation is slower than previously thought.
A significant impact on climate change predictions could arise from this study’s findings as the ability of secondary forests to soak up carbon from the atmosphere may have been over-estimated in the climate change predictions.
Over two decades, forest growth was monitored in this study and it shows that the regrowth in the Amazon could be hampered due to the widespread loss of forests and the increasing climate change
An important tool in combatting human-caused climate change was thought to be the forests regrowing after clear-felling(commonly called as secondary forests), by taking huge amounts of carbon from the atmosphere.
A study by a group of Brazilian and British researchers showed that only 40% of the carbon in forests that had not been disturbed by humans was held by the studied secondary forests even after 60 years of regrowth. It can take up to a century for the forests to recover fully if the current trends continue which means that their ability to help fight climate change might have been overestimated vastly.
The journal Ecology published this study. The
study showed that during droughts, the secondary forests took less carbon from the atmosphere and yet the number of drought-years in the Amazon has increased due to climate change.From the Federal University of Pará, Fernando Elias, the study’s first author explained: “An increase in temperature of 0.1 C per decade was seen in the region we studied and during periods of droughts, the tree growth was lower. To mitigate climate change by secondary forests, with predictions of more drought in the future, we must be cautious about their ability in helping. The urgent need for the need for international agreements to minimize climate change impacts is highlighted in our study.
Secondary forests also serve as an important habitat for threatened species beyond helping combat climate change. It was however found that only 56% of biodiversity level was seen in the secondary forests when compared to the local undisturbed forests, having no increase in species diversity during monitoring for 20 years.
In recent years, many nations have made large reforestation pledges and under the Paris climate agreement, Brazil committed to restoring 12 million ha of forest. Altogether, these results suggest that these large forest restoration pledges should be accompanied by firmer action against deforestation of primary forests, and cautious consideration about how and where to reforest.
In the Amazon, the oldest deforestation frontier region that has lost almost all of its original forest cover, Bragança, Brazil, is where the research was undertaken.
At the Brazilian Agricultural Research Corporation, a researcher, Biologist Joice Ferreira, said: ” To overcome the lack of seed sources and seed-dispersing animals, our study shows that forest recovery needs additional support and investment in heavily deforested areas. This is different from the other areas we have studied where without any human intervention, the historic deforestation is much lower and secondary forests recover much faster.”
In the United Kingdom, Professor of Conservation Science at Lancaster University, Jos Barlow, stressed the need for more long-term studies. He said: ” In the Amazon, secondary forests are increasingly widespread and they are of global importance as they can mitigate climate change. To better understand secondary forest resilience, more long-term studies like ours are needed so that restoration can be targeted to the areas that can preserve biodiversity and do the most to combat climate change.”
