O que explica a explosão de incêndios na Amazônia

 

 

Amazônia foi o bioma mais afetado pelos incêndios deste ano no Brasil

Nádia Pontes

 Bioma concentra mais da metade dos 223 mil km² devastados pelo fogo no Brasil neste ano. Condições climáticas e ação criminosa ajudam a explicar fenômeno.

 

Os incêndios pelo Brasil devastaram 223 mil km² de janeiro a setembro deste ano – uma área equivalente a quase 2,5 vezes o tamanho de Portugal. A Amazônia foi o bioma mais atingido, contabilizando mais da metade, 51%, da área queimada até agora em 2024. A extensão do estrago espanta até quem está acostumada a estudar o comportamento do fogo.

"É assustador. É um dado muito impactante comparando com os outros anos e o quanto de Floresta Amazônica foi queimada nesses meses", comenta Ane Alencar, diretora de Ciência do Instituto de Pesquisa Ambiental da Amazônia (Ipam).

Na Amazônia, em setembro foram queimados no bioma mais de 56 mil km², ao todo no ano já foram 113 mil km². No mês passado, foram devastados 30 mil km² dos 47 mil km² queimados este ano somente na floresta nativa – o que corresponde a cerca de 20% de toda a área destruída pelo fogo no país em 2024.

Alencar é uma das cientistas que analisa os dados coletados pelo Monitor do Fogo, do Mapbiomas. O levantamento mais recente, divulgado nesta sexta-feira (11/10), mostra que mais da metade da área queimada no Brasil (56%) fica em três estados: Mato Grosso, Pará e Tocantins.

 

A análise mostra que, na Amazônia, a situação foi mais crítica de janeiro a setembro em Terras Indígenas, grandes propriedades e florestas públicas não destinadas. O fogo nesta época não começa de forma espontânea, mas é iniciado por ação em humana em mais de 90% dos casos.

"Nas grandes fazendas, quando queima começa, há grande dificuldade para controlar o fogo", comenta Alencar.

O papel do clima

A extrema escassez de água e o calor intenso ao longo de todo o ano têm um papel-chave neste cenário, afirmam todas as fontes ouvidas pela DW. Segundo especialistas em clima, a seca já teria começado na primavera do ano passado, e a estação chuvosa, no início de 2024, chegou tarde e fraca.

"É um ano muito atípico. 2023 foi o mais quente da história e 2024 deve superá-lo. Esse calor e o déficit hídrico são fatores determinantes para aumentar o risco de incêndio", diz José Marengo, coordenador-geral de Pesquisa e Desenvolvimento do Centro Nacional de Monitoramento e Alertas de Desastres Naturais (Cemaden).

Em 2023, dez ondas de calor foram registradas no Brasil, sete delas chegaram depois de agosto. Até setembro de 2024, o país já enfrentou oito eventos do tipo. "O preocupante é que ainda teremos dois meses bastante quentes pela frente", alerta Marengo.

Amazônia enfrenta uma grande seca neste ano

 

Em alguns pontos do Brasil, não há sinal de chuva há mais de um ano. As cidades de Barcelos e Santa Isabel do Rio Negro, no Amazonas, vivem 16 meses de seca, aponta o índice acompanhado pelo Cemaden. Isso diminuiu a umidade do solo, prolonga a estiagem porque plantas, lagos e rios transpiram menos – o que reduz a formação de nuvens de chuva.

"As condições climáticas certamente têm um peso grande. Numa situação como essa, qualquer ‘foguinho' vira um grande incêndio. As chamas escapam e queimam grandes áreas", comenta Alencar.

Bombeiros e brigadistas costumam se referir ao fenômeno "30, 30, 30" para calcular o risco de incêndio. O primeiro deles diz respeito à temperatura: quando ela atinge ou ultrapassa os 30°C, o ar fica mais seco e facilita a propagação do fogo. O outro é a marca em percentagem da umidade relativa do ar que, quando é menor que 30%, a vegetação fica mais inflamável. O terceiro tem a ver com a velocidade do vento, um "propagador" de chamas quando chega a 30 km/h.

 

A ligação com o desmatamento

Pesquisadores buscam também entender o que mais pode explicar a existência de tantos focos de calor mesmo com o desmatamento na Amazônia em queda. Historicamente, o fogo é usado para limpar a área depois que as árvores são cortadas principalmente de forma criminosa.

"Se a gente não tivesse reduzido o desmatamento na Amazônia nesses dois anos, eu diria que hoje estaríamos numa situação absolutamente catastrófica. Teríamos muitos incêndios que realmente já teriam totalmente perdido o controle e queimado 100% de área de floresta", argumenta André Lima, secretário de Controle dos Desmatamentos e Ordenamento Ambiental e Territorial do Ministério do Meio Ambiente (MMA).

 

Dados do Instituto Nacional de Pesquisas Espaciais (Inpe) indicam que, de janeiro a setembro, houve redução de 24% de derrubada da Amazônia em relação ao mesmo período anterior. Ainda assim, a área de florestas atingidas pelo fogo cresceu de uma média de 10% para 35% do total, admite Lima.

Quando olha para os gráficos, Ane Alencar vê semelhanças entre 2024 e 2010, que registrou queimadas em nível semelhante ao atual. Naquele ano, o Brasil tinha quase o mesmo nível de desmatamento de agora e uma situação climática grave. Com um El Niño instalado e o aquecimento das águas do Atlântico Norte, a bacia Amazônica sofreu com a pior seca registrada até então.

"Isso indica que ter reduzido o desmatamento teve uma contribuição importante, caso contrário poderia haver muito mais fogo na paisagem", avalia Alencar.

Uma nova categoria de crime

A desconfiança é de que a facilidade para incendiar uma floresta mais seca tenha tornado o fogo uma arma. Beto Mesquita, engenheiro florestal e membro da Coalizão Brasil Clima, Florestas e Agricultura, vê a possiblidade de as chamas serem usadas intencionalmente em maior proporção para eliminar mata nativa.

Fumaça de incêndios cobriu Manaus em agosto

 

"Se a pessoa desmata, ela corre o risco de ser pega pela fiscalização e pelo satélite. Então ela pula esta etapa e já taca fogo poque a floresta está seca. Em condições normais, a Floresta Amazônica não pegaria fogo tão facilmente", diz Mesquita.

André Lima, do MMA, também enxerga a mesma possiblidade. Ele diz que é muito difícil alguém ser pego em flagrante provocando um incêndio, principalmente na Amazônia, e isso encoraja grupos criminosos que invadem terras públicas. "É mais difícil ser punido por este crime, é difícil multar uma pessoa por este ato porque é necessário comprovar que ela ateou fogo", afirma Lima.

De toda a área queimada de floresta, não se sabe exatamente o quanto dos incêndios começaram dentro da mata, ou chegaram até a vegetação nativa vindos de outra parte. Mas o aumento significativo desse tipo de ocorrência reforça a hipótese de ação criminosa.

"É um indício muito forte de que realmente foi colocado fogo na floresta, vamos dizer assim, é uma nova estratégia de quem está ocupando áreas ilegalmente na Amazônia", diz Lima.

Saídas para a crise

Para José Marengo, está cada vez mais evidente o efeito catastrófico das mudanças climáticas no país. "Elas estão afetando a intensidade dos eventos extremos e isso está gerando um clima bastante diferente", diz o pesquisador do Cemaden.

Diante da indicação de que o quadro irá se repetir nos próximos anos, com estiagens severas e prolongadas, o caminho é prevenir, treinar pessoal e afinar a coordenação das ações em todos os níveis de governos, opina Mesquita.

"Nós não temos só floresta tropical. Nós temos savana tropical, o Cerrado, que é muito mais vulnerável. Nós temos áreas de campos, nós temos o Pantanal, Caatinga, temos outras áreas que antes não queimavam tanto e que hoje estão queimando muito mais. Então temos muito trabalho pela frente", pontua Mesquita.

O uso do fogo, mesmo que autorizado, talvez tenha que ser revisto, sugere Mesquita. "O fogo ainda é um elemento de uso para limpeza de pastagens, e a maior parte da pastagem brasileira é extensiva, ela não é manejada de maneira tecnificada. E sob as condições climáticas que estamos vivendo, isso não será mais possível", conclui.

 

Collapsing wildlife populations near ‘points of no return’, report warns

An orangutan in Sabah, where much of the forest has been cleared for palm oil. A study found 3,000 orangutans a year were being killed on Borneo’s palm oil plantations. Photograph: Alamy

 

Global wildlife populations have plunged by an average of 73% in 50 years, a new scientific assessment has found, as humans continue to push ecosystems to the brink of collapse.

Latin America and the Caribbean recorded the steepest average declines in recorded wildlife populations, with a 95% fall, according to the WWF and the Zoological Society of London’s (ZSL) biennial Living Planet report. They were followed by Africa with 76%, and Asia and the Pacific at 60%. Europe and North America recorded comparatively lower falls of 35% and 39% respectively since 1970.

Scientists said this was explained by much larger declines in wildlife populations in Europe and North America before 1970 that were now being replicated in other parts of the world. They warned that the loss could quicken in future years as global heating accelerates, triggered by tipping points in the Amazon rainforest, Arctic and marine ecosystems, which could have catastrophic consequences for nature and human society.

Anta, Mata Atlântica - Brazil

 Matthew Gould, ZSL’s chief executive, said the report’s message was clear: “We are dangerously close to tipping points for nature loss and climate change. But we know nature can recover, given the opportunity, and that we still have the chance to act.”

 

The figures, known as the Living Planet Index, are made up of almost 35,000 population trends from 5,495 birds, fish, amphibians and reptiles species around the world, and have become one of the leading indicators of the global state of wildlife populations. In recent years, the metric has faced criticism for potentially overestimating wildlife declines.

The index is weighted in favour of data from Africa and Latin America, which have suffered larger declines but have far less reliable information about populations. This has had the effect of driving a dramatic top line of global collapse despite information from Europe and North America showing less dramatic falls.

Hannah Wauchope, an ecology lecturer at Edinburgh University, said: “The weighting of the Living Planet Index is imperfect, but until we have systematic sampling of biodiversity worldwide, some form of weighting will be necessary. What we do know is that as habitat destruction and other threats to biodiversity continue, there will continue to be declines.”

Critics question the mathematical soundness of the index’s approach, but acknowledge that other indicators also show major declines in the state of many wildlife populations around the world.

Brazilian rainforest in Humaitá. The report identifies land-use change driven by agriculture as the most important cause of the fall in wildlife populations. Photograph: Adriano Machado/Reuters

 

In a critique of the index published by Springer Nature in June, scientists said it “suffers from several mathematical and statistical issues, leading to a bias towards an apparent decrease even for balanced populations”.

They continued: “This does not mean that in reality there is no overall decrease in vertebrate populations [but the] current phase of the Anthropocene [epoch] is characterised by more complex changes than … simple disappearance.”

The IUCN’s Red List, which has assessed the health of more than 160,000 plant and animal species, has found that almost a third are at risk of extinction. Of those assessed, 41% of amphibians, 26% of mammals and 34% of conifer trees are at risk of disappearing.

The index has been published days ahead of the Cop16 biodiversity summit in Cali, Colombia, where countries will meet for the first time since agreeing on a set of international targets to halt the freefall of life on Earth. Governments have never met a single biodiversity target in the history of UN agreements and scientists are urging world leaders to make sure this decade is different.

Susana Muhamad, Cop16 president and Colombia’s environment minister, said: “We must listen to science and take action to avoid collapse.

“Globally, we are reaching points of no return and irreversibly affecting the planet’s life-support systems. We are seeing the effects of deforestation and the transformation of natural ecosystems, intensive land use and climate change.

“The world is witnessing the mass bleaching of coral reefs, the loss of tropical forests, the collapse of polar ice caps and serious changes to the water cycle, the foundation of life on our planet,” she said.

Land-use change was the most important driver of the fall in wildlife populations as agricultural frontiers expanded, often at the expense of ecosystems such as tropical rainforests. Mike Barrett, director of science and conservation at WWF-UK, said countries such as the UK were driving the destruction by continuing to import food and livestock feed grown on previously wild ecosystems.

“The data that we’ve got shows that the loss was driven by a fragmentation of natural habitats. What we are seeing through the figures is an indicator of a more profound change that is going on in our natural ecosystems … they are losing their resilience to external shocks and change. We are now superimposing climate change on these already degraded habitats,” said Barrett.

“I have been involved in writing these reports for 10 years and, in writing this one, it was difficult. I was shocked,” he said.

China to head green energy boom with 60% of new projects in next six years

 

A 25MW solar hybrid photovoltaic power generation project in Duntou town, Jiangsu province, China. Aquaculture and fish farming occurs under the panels. Photograph: Costfoto/NurPhoto/REX/Shutterstock

 

Solar panels are seen at a solar power plant in Pingdingshan, Henan province, China June 7, 2018. Picture taken June 7, 2018. REUTERS/Stringer/File Photo 

 

The first Panda Solar Station started operating in Datong in August 2017 Credit: Getty Images

  China is expected to account for almost 60% of all renewable energy capacity installed worldwide between now and 2030, according to the International Energy Agency.

The IEA’s highly influential renewable energy report found that over the next six years renewable energy projects will roll out at three times the pace of the previous six years, led by the clean energy programmes of China and India.

It found that the world’s renewable energy capacity is on course to outpace the 2030 goals set by governments to roughly equal the power systems in China, the EU, India and the US combined.

Fatih Birol, the executive director of the IEA, said: “If I could sum this [trend] up in two words they would be: China, solar.”

 

China will have over half of the world’s renewables by the end of the decade. The solar power surge is thought to have slowed China’s coal power pipeline, which grew by 100 GW of new power plant permits in 2022 and 2023. In the first half of 2024 China issued permits for only 12 new projects totaling 9.1 GW, according to Global Energy Monitor.

The growth in solar capacity to 2030 will account for 80% of all new renewable power added globally by the end of this decade, according to the IEA. It expects the rollout to accelerate due to declining costs and policy support which will enable homes and businesses to invest in solar panels to reduce their electricity bills.

Wind power is also showing signs of recovering from the steep hike in interest rates and supply chain costs which has hampered the industry, particularly for capital-intensive offshore windfarms.

The IEA expects that the rate of global wind power growth will double between 2024 and 2030 compared with the previous six years. In the UK, the government has set a target of quadrupling Britain’s offshore wind power by 2030 while spurring the development of floating wind turbines.

Floating windfarms are expected to be a small share of the offshore wind industry by 2030 but a new report by Renewable UK, published on Wednesday, has found that by 2050, floating turbines could provide one-third of the UK’s offshore wind capacity and contribute £47bn to the economy, particularly Scottish and Welsh port communities.

Birol said: “Renewables are moving faster than national governments can set targets for. This is mainly driven not just by efforts to lower emissions or boost energy security – it’s increasingly because renewables today offer the cheapest option to add new power plants in almost all countries around the world.”

The green energy boom means renewables are on track to grow by 2.7 times by 2030, exceeding the goals set out by governments by nearly 25%, the report found. But this growth still falls narrowly short of the commitment made by world leaders to triple renewables by the end of the decade to cut the world’s reliance on fossil fuels.

About 120 world leaders pledged to triple the world’s renewable energy capacity before 2030 in a bold attempt to slash the global consumption of fossil fuels at the UN’s Cop28 climate talks in Dubai last year.

 

Birol said it was “entirely possible” to meet the target, and added that there were three steps that global governments could take to speed up the rate at which renewable energy becomes operational.

First, global leaders need to recognise the “critical importance of building power grids” to speed up the connection of new renewable energy projects, he said. The IEA found that at least 1,650 gigawatts of renewable capacity were now in advanced stages of development and waiting for a grid connection, 150GW higher than at this point last year.

Birol added that countries needed to reduce the time it took for renewable energy developers to get permission for new projects. It can take seven years for windfarms, he said, and five years for a solar farm.

Finally, the IEA urged international financial institutions needed to do more to back renewable energy in emerging and developing economies which continued to lag behind developed countries.

“One of the biggest ‘energy inequalities’ I see is in sub-Saharan Africa where one in two people don’t have access to reliable electricity. It has enormous solar power potential and yet across the whole region there is the same solar capacity as in Belgium. It is frustrating,” he said.

 

 

Deforestation ‘roaring back’ despite 140-country vow to end destruction

 

Bird’s eye view of tropical rainforest deforestation. Indonesia’s deforestation alone spiked by 57% in a year, the report says. Photograph: WhitcombeRD/Getty/iStockPhoto

 Demand for beef, soy, palm oil and nickel hindering efforts to halt demolition by 2030, global report finds

 The destruction of global forests increased in 2023, and is higher than when 140 countries promised three years ago to halt deforestation by the end of the decade, an analysis shows.

The rising demolition of the forests puts ambitions to halt the climate crisis and stem the huge worldwide losses of wildlife even further from reach, the researchers warn.

Almost 6.4m hectares (16m acres) of forest were razed in 2023, according to the report. Even more forest – 62.6m ha – was degraded as road building, logging and forest fires took their toll. There were spikes in deforestation in Indonesia and Bolivia, driven by political changes and continued demand for commodities including beef, soy, palm oil, paper and nickel in rich countries.

The researchers said attempts at voluntary cuts on deforestation were not working and strong regulation and more funding for forest protection were needed.

Amazon Rainforest Deforestation

Amazon Rainforest Deforestation

 

The report highlighted a bright spot in the Brazilian Amazon, where President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva’s new government cut deforestation by 62% in its first year.

“The bottom line is that, globally, deforestation has gotten worse, not better, since the beginning of the decade,” said Ivan Palmegiani, a consultant at the research group Climate Focus and lead author of the report.

“We’re only six years away from a critical global deadline to end deforestation, and forests continue to be chopped down, degraded, and set ablaze at alarming rates,” he said. “Righting the course is possible if all countries make it a priority, and especially if industrialised countries seriously reconsider their excessive consumption levels and support forest countries.”

Erin D Matson, a senior consultant at Climate Focus and co-author of the report, said: “When the right conditions are in place, countries see major progress. The next year, if economic or political conditions change, forest loss can come roaring back. We’re seeing this effect in the spiking deforestation in Indonesia and Bolivia. Ultimately, to meet global forest protection targets, we must make forest protection immune to political and economic whims.”

Aerial view of reforestation. Most countries backed the 2030 zero deforestation pledge at the UN Cop26 climate summit in 2021. Photograph: Jose Luis Raota/Getty Images

 

Most countries backed the 2030 zero deforestation pledge at the UN Cop26 climate summit in 2021. The 2024 forest declaration assessment, produced by a coalition of research and civil society organisations, assessed progress towards the goal using a baseline of the average deforestation between 2018 and 2020. It found progress was significantly off track, with the level of deforestation in 2023 almost 50% higher than steady progress towards zero would require.

Matson said: “Indonesia’s deforestation alone spiked by 57% in one year. This was in large part attributable to surging global demand for things like paper and mined metals like nickel.

“But it’s also clear that the Indonesian government took its foot off the gas. It experienced the steepest drop in deforestation of any tropical country from 2015-17 and 2020-22, so we have to hope that this setback is only temporary.” In 2023, Indonesia produced half the world’s nickel, a metal used in many green technologies.

“Brazil gives us an example of positive progress [in the Amazon] but deforestation in the Cerrado [tropical savanna] increased 68% year over year,” she said.

 

Amazon

Amazon

The country has also been ravaged by forest fires that are being made more likely and intense by the climate crisis. The report found that about 45m ha have burned in the past five years.

Other countries that made progress towards the 2030 deforestation target included Australia, Colombia, Paraguay, Venezuela and Vietnam. Outside the tropics, temperate forests in North America and Latin America recorded the greatest absolute levels of deforestation.

The researchers said funding for forest protection, strengthening the land rights of Indigenous people and reducing demand for commodities produced via deforestation were needed.

The EU has proposed ambitious regulations that would ban the sales of products linked to deforestation, such as coffee, chocolate, leather and furniture. However, on 3 October, the European Commission proposed a one-year delay “to phase in the system” after protests from countries including Australia, Brazil, Indonesia and Ivory Coast.

Matson said: “This pushback is largely driven by political pressures, and it’s a shame. We can’t rely on voluntary efforts – they have made very little progress over the last decade.”

 

Climate warning as world’s rivers dry up at fastest rate for 30 years

 

A tugboat navigates around sandbars amid low water levels on the Mississippi River. Water levels on the river hit a record low in 2023. Photograph: Gerald Herbert/AP

 

Rivers dried up at the highest rate in three decades in 2023, putting global water supply at risk, data has shown.

Over the past five years, there have been lower-than-average river levels across the globe and reservoirs have also been low, according to the World Meteorological Organization’s (WMO) State of Global Water Resources report.

In 2023, more than 50% of global river catchment areas showed abnormal conditions, with most being in deficit. This was similar in 2022 and 2021. Areas facing severe drought and low river discharge conditions included large territories of North, Central and South America; for instance, the Amazon and Mississippi rivers had record low water levels. On the other side of the globe, in Asia and Oceania, the large Ganges, Brahmaputra and Mekong river basins experienced lower-than-normal conditions almost over the entire basin territories.

Rio Negro Amazon Brazil

 

Amazon Brazil

 Climate breakdown appears to be changing where water goes, and helping to cause extreme floods and droughts. 2023 was the hottest year on record, with rivers running low and countries facing droughts, but it also brought devastating floods across the globe.

The extremes were also influenced, according to the WMO, by the transition from La Niña to El Niño in mid-2023. These are naturally occurring weather patterns; El Niño refers to the above-average sea-surface temperatures that periodically develop across the east-central equatorial Pacific, while La Niña refers to the periodic cooling in those areas. However, scientists say climate breakdown is exacerbating the impacts of these weather phenomena and making them more difficult to predict.

 

 

Areas that faced flooding included the east coast of Africa, the North Island of New Zealand, and the Philippines.

In the UK, Ireland, Finland and Sweden, there was above-normal discharge, which is the volume of water flowing through a river at a given point in time.

“Water is the canary in the coalmine of climate change,” said the WMO secretary general, Celeste Saulo. “We receive distress signals in the form of increasingly extreme rainfall, floods and droughts which wreak a heavy toll on lives, ecosystems and economies. Melting ice and glaciers threaten long-term water security for many millions of people. And yet we are not taking the necessary urgent action.

“As a result of rising temperatures, the hydrological cycle has accelerated. It has also become more erratic and unpredictable, and we are facing growing problems of either too much or too little water. A warmer atmosphere holds more moisture which is conducive to heavy rainfall. More rapid evaporation and drying of soils worsen drought conditions,” she added.

 

These extreme water conditions put supply at risk. Currently, 3.6 billion people face inadequate access to water for at least one month a year, and this is expected to increase to more than 5 billion by 2050, according to UN Water.

Glaciers also fared badly last year, losing more than 600 gigatonnes of water, the highest figure in 50 years of observations, according to the WMO’s preliminary data for September 2022 to August 2023. Mountains in western North America and the European Alps faced extreme melting. Switzerland’s Alps lost about 10% of their remaining volume over the past two years.

“Far too little is known about the true state of the world’s freshwater resources. We cannot manage what we do not measure. This report seeks to contribute to improved monitoring, data-sharing, cross-border collaboration and assessments,” said Saulo. “This is urgently needed.”

 2023 foi o ano mais seco para os rios do planeta em três décadas. 

 

Antarctica is ‘greening’ at dramatic rate as climate heats

 

Norsel Point on Amsler Island in the Palmer Archipelago of Antarctica. Photograph: Dan Charman/PA

 Analysis of satellite data finds plant cover has increased more than tenfold over the last few decades

 

Plant cover across the Antarctic peninsula has soared more than tenfold over the last few decades, as the climate crisis heats up the icy continent.

Analysis of satellite data found there was less than one sq kilometre of vegetation in 1986 but there was almost 12km2 of green cover by 2021. The spread of the plants, mostly mosses, has accelerated since 2016, the researchers found.

The growth of vegetation on a continent dominated by ice and bare rock is a sign of the reach of global heating into the Antarctic, which is warming faster than the global average. The scientists warned that this spread could provide a foothold for alien invasive species into the pristine Antarctic ecosystem.

Greening has also been reported in the Arctic, and in 2021 rain, not snow, fell on the summit of Greenland’s huge ice cap for the first time on record.

Green Island in Antarctica. Photograph: Matt Amesbury

 “The Antarctic landscape is still almost entirely dominated by snow, ice and rock, with only a tiny fraction colonised by plant life,” said Dr Thomas Roland, at the University of Exeter, UK, and who co-led the study. “But that tiny fraction has grown dramatically – showing that even this vast and isolated wilderness is being affected by human-caused climate change.” The peninsula is about 500,000km2 in total.

Roland warned that future heating, which will continue until carbon emissions are halted, could bring “fundamental changes to the biology and landscape of this iconic and vulnerable region”. The study is published in the journal Nature Geoscience and based on analysis of Landsat images.

Prof Andrew Shepherd, at Northumbria University, UK, and not part of the study team, said: “This is a very interesting study and tallies with what I found when I visited Larsen Inlet [on the peninsula] a couple of years ago. We landed on a beach that was buried beneath the Larsen Ice Shelf until the shelf collapsed in 1986-88. We found it to now have a river with green algae growing in it!”

“This place had been hidden from the atmosphere for thousands of years and was colonised by plants within a couple of decades of it becoming ice free – it’s astonishing really,” he said. “It’s a barometer of climate change but also a tipping point for the region as life now has a foothold there.”

The acceleration in the spread of the mosses from 2016 coincides with the start of a marked decrease in sea ice extent around Antarctica. Warmer open seas may be leading to wetter conditions that favour plant growth, the researchers said. Mosses can colonise bare rock and create the foundation of soils that, along with the milder conditions, could allow other plants to grow.

 

Dr Olly Bartlett, at the University of Hertfordshire and also co-leader of the new study, said: “Soil in Antarctica is mostly poor or nonexistent, but this increase in plant life will add organic matter, and facilitate soil formation. This raises the risk of non-native and invasive species arriving, possibly carried by eco-tourists, scientists or other visitors to the continent.”

A study in 2017 showed the rate of moss growth was increasing but it did not assess the area covered. Another study, in 2022, showed that Antarctica’s two native flowering plants were spreading on Signy Island, to the north of the Antarctic peninsula.

Green algae is also blooming across the surface of the melting snow on the peninsula. Trees were growing at the south pole a few million years ago, when the planet last had as much CO₂ in the atmosphere as it does today.

 

Wildfires are burning through humanity’s carbon budget, study shows

Firefighters battling a wildfire in Corinthia, Greece, in October. Each fire has a double impact on the global climate. Photograph: Yannis Kolesidis/EPA

Forests around world being changed from carbon sinks into carbon sources, making it harder to slow global heating

Wildfires are burning through the carbon budget that humans have allocated themselves to limit global heating, a study shows.

The authors said this accelerating trend was approaching – and may have already breached – a “critical temperature threshold” after which fires cause significant shifts in tree cover and carbon storage.

“Alarmingly, the latest temperature at which, globally, these impacts become pronounced is 1.34C – close to current levels of warming [above preindustrial levels],” said the UK Met Office, which led the research.

Forests are going up in smoke in Brazil, the US, Greece, Portugal and even the Arctic Circle amid the Earth’s two hottest years in recorded history.

Each fire has a double impact on the global climate: first, by emitting carbon from the burned trees, and second, by reducing the capacity of forests to absorb carbon dioxide.

This adds to the heat in the Earth system, which has already been raised by the burning of gas, oil and coal. Global temperatures are already 1.3C higher than in the preindustrial age, according to the Met Office.

Pantanal - Brazil

Pantanal - Brazil

Amazon - Brazil

Amazon - Brazil

Amazon - Brazil

 As temperatures rise, droughts become more frequent, rainy seasons shorten and forests become more vulnerable to fire. This is made worse by human clearance of land for farms, which is particularly pronounced in South America. A separate study last week showed the continent is becoming warmer, drier, and more flammable.

Other research showed the Amazon is undergoing a “critical slowing down”, with more than a third of the rainforest struggling to recover from drought after four supposedly “one-in-a-century” dry spells in less than 20 years.

These compounding impacts, which scientists call positive feedbacks, are turning forests from carbon sinks into carbon sources.

This makes it harder to slow global heating, even before the world reaches the 1.5C lower target of the Paris climate agreement.

 

“Fires are reducing the ability of forests and other ecosystems to store carbon, narrowing our window to keep global warming in check,” said Dr Chantelle Burton, the study’s lead author.

This is not the only positive feedback that concerns scientists, who are also worried that the rapid melting of ice caps is reducing the planet’s “albedo” ability to reflect sunlight back into space.

Climatologists say the already dire situation will deteriorate until humankind, particularly in the wealthy global north, stops burning fossil fuels.