The creation of protected areas and Indigenous reserves offers the best hope for conserving the biodiversity of the Amazon; however, the management of the human modified landscapes will determine whether society protects the ecosystem services essential for the economic health of the continent. Models predict that an ecological tipping point will be crossed when about 25 per cent of the region’s forests have been converted to agriculture – just a few percentage points above the current level of eighteen per cent. When (if) that tipping point is crossed, the decline in atmospheric water recycling will lead to a catastrophic decline in rainfall across the farmlands of South America, including those in the Southern Amazon, but also in Central Brazil, Paraguay, Bolivia and Northern Argentina. The predicted tipping point at ~25% deforestation is a basin-wide metric; however, large parts of the Southern Amazon passed that metric approximately twenty years ago. Dozens of municipalities in Pará, Mato Grosso and Rondônia have lost more than forty per cent of their original forest cover. Those landscapes are now both hotter and drier. It could be worse. Producers still benefit from water recycled in the Central Amazon and, as more upwind landscapes are deforested, these will cease to provide this precipitation subsidy. When that happens, the farmers and ranchers of Mato Grosso will be forced to adapt to a new reality. Some producers will migrate into landscapes less susceptible to precipitation declines, a process already underway as farmers expand northward, attracted by cheap land and…This article was originally published on Mongabay
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