The world’s tropical forests are losing their ability to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere – a development that could have serious implications on efforts to forestall climate change.
The world’s tropical forests are losing their ability to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere – a development that could have serious implications on efforts to forestall climate change.
That is one of the findings of an international study by dozens of researchers – including the University of Toronto’s Sean Thomas, a professor of forestry at the John H. Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape, and Design – that was featured on the cover of this week’s issue of Nature.
In the mid-1990s, Thomas helped establish four 10-hectare research plots in the Ituri Rainforest in what is now the Democratic Republic of the Congo. The densely treed areas, teeming with small forest antelope, monkeys, and the occasional zebra-striped okapi, were essentially living laboratories that, a quarter century later, yielded key data for the global study led by researchers at the University of Leeds.
“Intact tropical forests have been offsetting global carbon dioxide emissions, [but] that's going to go away,” says Thomas of the study’s findings.
Continue reading at University of Toronto.
Image via Sean Thomas.
