Tropical trees in Australia’s rainforests have been dying at double the previous rate since the 1980s, potentially because of climate change, according to an international study published May 18 in the journal Nature.
Tropical trees in Australia’s rainforests have been dying at double the previous rate since the 1980s, potentially because of climate change, according to an international study published May 18 in the journal Nature. Researchers found the death rates of tropical trees have doubled in the past 35 years as global warming increases the drying power of the atmosphere.
Intact tropical rainforests are major stores of carbon, absorbing around 12% of human-caused carbon dioxide emissions. But their deterioration reduces biomass and carbon storage, making it increasingly difficult to keep global peak temperatures well below the target 2 degrees C required by the Paris Agreement.
“It was a shock to detect such a marked increase in tree mortality, let alone a trend consistent across the diversity of species and sites we studied,” said lead author David Bauman, a tropical forest ecologist at the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center (SERC) and the University of Oxford. “A sustained doubling of mortality risk would imply the carbon stored in trees returns twice as fast to the atmosphere.”
Read more at: Smithsonian University
Northeast Australia’s relict tropical rainforests, one of the oldest and most isolated rainforests in the world. (Photo Credit: Alexander Schenkin)
