Human activity has caused some rainforests to switch from being a solution for climate change, to a source of it, a new study has found.
The study, published in the scientific journal Nature, discovered that Africa’s forests and woody savannas, which “historically acted as a carbon sink, removing atmospheric carbon and storing it as biomass” made “a critical transition from a carbon sink to a carbon source between 2010 and 2017”.
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Using satellite data, researchers at the National Centre for Earth Observation at the Universities of Leicester, Sheffield and Edinburgh in the United Kingdom were able to track the changes in the amount of carbon being absorbed by trees and woody areas.
“The implications of this shift are profound. Africa’s forests and woodlands have historically served as a carbon sink. Now, they are contributing to widening the global greenhouse gas emissions gap that needs to be filled to stay within the goals of the Paris Agreement,” the report stated.
The 2015 Paris Agreement is a treaty between 196 countries acting to mitigate climate change and to keep the world’s temperature from rising more than 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) above pre-industrial levels.
What has the study found?
In short, Africa’s forests are facing “increasing pressures” which have led to a decline in their ability to remove carbon from the atmosphere.
Currently, Africa’s forests are responsible for about one-fifth of global carbon removal. The largest of the continent’s forests is the Congo rainforest – the second largest in the world after the Amazon, and often dubbed the “lungs of Africa”.
The report found that between 2011 and 2017, Africa’s forests lost 106 million tonnes in biomass – living organisms such as plants – each year. This means their ability to absorb carbon from the atmosphere has been severely reduced.
The worst-affected areas were reportedly the tropical broadleaf forests in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Madagascar and other parts of West Africa.
What has caused this?
Carbon output has risen exponentially in the industrial age and is largely caused by burning fossil fuels such as coal, oil and gas.
While forests were adept at absorbing this excess carbon for some time, their ability to do so has been impacted by increased logging to make way for agricultural land and to provide materials for infrastructure projects.
“The observed trends may be further exacerbated in the future by population growth in Africa, the increasing export demand, particularly from