The Amazon – On the Path to Collapse
The trend is now painfully obvious. Degradation in the Amazon is closely tied to compound drought and heat waves, low-soil moisture and low humidity. These compound drought events have become far more frequent and severe since the turn of the century and have resulted in the Amazon becoming a net emitter of greenhouse gases instead of absorbing them. This study only quantified the frequency and extremeness of the droughts since 1981. More work will certainly be forthcoming on the net carbon emissions from the forest die off and fires caused by this most extreme drought in the Amazon yet.
What is important with this work is the visualization of the extent of the unprecedented compound drought. In the excerpt below from the cover image, the amount of color in the graphs not only represents the magnitude of the drought events, but with more color showing in an event, or more drought and heat for longer periods of time, the extremeness of the drought increases nonlinearly in a feedback loop where dryness allows greater heating and greater heating creates greater dryness in a loop.
The increase and magnitude of these events shows the Amazon is well on its way to collapse, but the authors ignore a simple reality of systems degradation.
“The previous record compound event of 2015– 2016 was particularly significant due to its ecological impacts (Jiménez-Mu˜noz et al 2016, Machado- Silva et al 2021). Therefore, the record-breaking compound drought and heat wave and lows soil moisture and humidity conditions in 2023–2024 are expected to have even more severe impacts.”
“The rising trend and growing exposure of the Amazon ecosystem to compound extremes and the potential climate-driven forest dieback (Lapola et al 2018) call for the development of adaptation measures that strengthen both societal and environmental resilience.”
What the authors do not acknowledge is that once degradation begins, adaptation measures are feeble at best. Once a system begins degrading, its collapse is foregone unless the thing that caused the degradation to begin is removed. There are things that can be done to create more societal resilience, but Mother Nature’s world plays by more strident rules. Collapse, once degradation begins, is a certainty in almost all systems, i.e. adaptation strategies are poorly meaningful in the face of degradation forces. This certainty does not included additional warming that only increases certainty and speed of collapse. Current warming is responsible for this foregone collapse and without any additional warming, drought events will continue to worsen because of the frequency of occurrence of extreme events.
What this frequency of occurrence is, is related to the 100-year weather event whose rarity limit’s its occurrence to a one percent chance every year, or the chance that it will occur every 100 years on very long time scales of tens of thousands of years. Because our climate has just warmed beyond the maximum natural variation of our old climate, new and more extreme weather events are now happening. If we stopped all warming this instant, as time passes, it is very likely those more rare and much more extreme events will occur. As extremeness increases, the chance that the Amazon will change to scrub or grassland increases because of the degradation of the rain machine. Once enough degradation to the forest occurs that diminishes the rain machine enough to disallow recruitment of young trees after mortality from drought, the drought-heat feedback takes over and precludes self-restoration.
To allow restoration, the warming that caused the degradation to begin must be removed. Nowhere in this work is restoration contemplated, nor are the risks of allowing current warming to continue or increase contemplated either. This is the reality we face. Adaptation may be able to help societal issues, but it is very unlikely that the Amazon can be saved without restoring our climate back to within the evolutionary boundaries of the rainforest, so that it is healthy enough to self-restore.
Restoring our climate is easy, because we know how to treat pollution. Eliminating the most important thing humanity has ever known is not easy as over 30 years of trying has revealed. It is time we began treating climate pollution like we treat almost all other pollution: by emitting it because we need the things it produces, then treating the residual pollution so we can be safe. The urgency of this sea change of climate change philosophy is clear. Collapsing ecosystems do not self-restore unless the thing that caused them to begin collapsing is removed. Future emissions reductions do not affect present warming that has caused collapses to begin.
Ferreira et al., Evaluating the 2023–2024 record dry-hot conditions in the Amazon in the context of historical compound extremes, Environmental Research Letters, July 11, 2025.
https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/ade550/pdf