www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/dec/16/year-in-the-life-of-the-amazon-deforestation-climate-disaster-mass-extermination
Destructive forces unleashed by Bolsonaro
To be in the Amazon in 2022 is to live between a tipping point that humanity must avoid and a turning point that we must invent. The world’s rainforest has degraded perilously close to a stage where it can no longer regenerate. As more trees are cleared, the forest is less able to produce its own rain. It starts to dry out, to become more vulnerable to fire and lightning strikes, until it changes into another ecosystem entirely, a savannah, which is less biodiverse, less capable of storing carbon, less powerful in generating the rainfall and storms that keep weather systems moving.
This is already happening along the arc of deforestation in the south and south-east Amazon, where the forest is turning to savannah as it emits more carbon than it absorbs. The rest of the rainforest is heading in the same direction: 17% has now been cleared and another 17% degraded. Scientists estimate the tipping point will occur when 20% to 25% of the Amazon is lost, which, at the current rate of ecocide, is more likely to be years rather than decades away.
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