Deforestation coupled with climate change is rapidly pushing the Amazon Rainforest toward a perilous tipping point that could come much sooner than previously thought. That’s the warning from a new paper, published in Nature, which determined that deforestation of 22-28% of the rainforest, combined with 1.5-1.9° Celsius (2.7-3.4° Fahrenheit) of global warming, could trigger a widespread transformation of the biome as early as the 2040s. Researchers found that crossing this deforestation/global temperature threshold could lead to more than two-thirds of the rainforest becoming degraded or transitioning to a savanna ecosystem. Currently, about 17-18% of the Amazon is deforested and 1.5°C of warming over preindustrial levels is likely to be officially reached by 2030, while scientists say it is increasingly likely 2°C (3.6°F) of warming may be surpassed by 2050. In the worst-case scenario, “This critical [Amazon] threshold could be reached as early as the 2040s,” Nico Wunderling, first author on the paper and a researcher at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, told Mongabay in an interview. “Although I’d be a little bit more optimistic: If current [downward] trends [for] Brazilian deforestation continue, then deforestation-wise, we might not reach [the tipping point] by mid-century.” “I think we can confidently say that the more deforestation happens, the lower this global warming threshold becomes,” said Arie Staal, study co-author and an assistant professor at Utrecht University. For Carlos Nobre, a professor at the University of São Paulo and co-chair of the Science Panel for the Amazon, who wasn’t involved in the…This article was originally published on Mongabay

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