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Whether you’re a student studying up for your General Science class or a corporate professional working in a totally unrelated industry, you need to have at least some general idea about how the world functions on a day-to-day basis. Case in point, a large part of our ecosystem depends on what has come to be known as the Amazon Rainforest, Amazonia, or the Amazon Jungle. It is a tropical rain forest in the Amazon biome that covers most of the Amazon basin of South America.
To some, the Amazon Rainforest is merely something they read in books; something they just come across in movies. Little do they know, however, how this patch of forest teeming with biodiversity is one of the most vital parts of the Earth as we know it. The Amazon rain forest has long been recognized as a repository of ecological services not only for local tribes and communities, but also for the rest of the world. It is also the only rain forest we have left in terms of size and diversity, with more than half of the forest located in Brazil.
Here are some key natural occurrences hinged on the Amazonia:
Precipitation
The moisture from the Amazon influences rainfall as far away as the Western United States and Central America. Furthermore, the precipitation that it creates extends well beyond the Amazon Basin, with Amazon rainfall and rivers feeding regions that generate 70% of South America’s GDP.
Carbon Storage
The 390 billion trees across the Amazon rain forest lock up massive amounts of carbon in their leaves, branches, and trunks. Studies have shown that the forest stores some 86 billion tons of carbon or more than a third of all carbon stored by tropical forests worldwide. Without the Amazon, the greenhouse effect our world is subject to would likely be even more pronounced, thus expediting climate change and making things worse in the future.
Biodiversity
The Amazon houses at least 10% of the world’s known biodiversity, including endemic and endangered flora and fauna; while its rivers accounts for 15%-16% of the world’s total river discharge into the oceans.
What are the implications of the Amazon Rain Forest being on fire?
The Amazon’s canopy cover also helps regulate temperature and humidity, and is intricately linked to regional climate patterns through hydrological cycles that depend on the forests. In a climactic turn of events, the Amazon Rainforest has been on fire for the past three weeks—as of writing—largely due to the onset of the dry season.
Wildfires often occur in Brazil during these months, but they are also sometimes deliberately started in efforts to illegally deforest land for cattle ranching. There are now more than 2,500 active fires in the Brazilian rain forest, with the smoke even being seen from space. With this, scientists are saying the Amazon is approaching a tipping point, after which it will irreversibly degrade into a dry savanna. At a time when the world needs billions more trees to absorb carbon and stabilize the climate, the planet is on the verge of losing its biggest rain forest.
Should this trend of deforestation continues, not only will the ecosystem tread the line between extinction and barely-living, the negative effects will inevitably flow into the economies of countries all over the world as well; especially third world countries that are less sustainable and less developed. Take our country, the Philippines, for example.
Given the fact that we are but an archipelago that depends largely on the external ecosystem, should climate change continue to worsen, all of our booming industries would cease to function normally. Even the property industry would be a bust. Nothing would be sustainable if no one does anything to mitigate the effects of climate change. The real estate industry would crumble, amid decreasing land space, destroyed ecosystems, and less material with which a property could use as foundation.
As such, the issues of the Amazon Rainforest are not only confined to Brazil where it is mostly located. It is inevitably interconnected with every inch of the Earth as a whole. We are not exempt to it; even less so the Philippine economy since we are but a microcosm of the dying ecosystem.
