About AMAZALERT
AMAZALERT examined how global and regional climate and land-use changes will impact Amazonian forests, agriculture, waters, and people; and how these impacts feed back onto climate.
“The AMAZALERT project has received funding from the European Union’s Seventh Framework Programme for research, technological development and demonstration under grant agreement no 282664, and was co-funded by many national agencies an institutes.”
News
| Article: 'Deforestation scenarios for the Bolivian lowlands' Tropical forests in South America play a key role in the provision of ecosystem services such as carbon sinks, biodiversity conservation, and global climate regulation. In previous decades, Bolivian forests have mainly been deforested by the expansion of agricultural frontier development, driven by the growing demands for beef and other productions. In the mid-2000s the Movimiento al Socialismo (MAS) party rose to power in Bolivia with the promise of promoting an alternative development model that would respect the environment. The party passed the world’s first laws granting rights to the environment, which they termed Mother Earth (Law No. 300 of 2012), and proposed an innovative framework that was expected to develop radical new conservation policies. The MAS conservationist discourse, policies, and productive practices, however, have since been in permanent tension. The government continues to guarantee food production through neo-extractivist methods by promoting the notion to expand agriculture from 3 to 13 million ha, risking the tropical forests and their ecosystem services. These actions raise major environmental and social concerns, as the potential impacts of such interventions are still unknown. The objective of this study is to explore an innovative land use modeling approach to simulate how the growing demand for land could affect future deforestation trends in Bolivia. In Environmental Research (In Press) / Graciela Tejada, Eloi Dalla-Nora, Diana Cordoba, Raffaele Lafortezza, Alex Ovando, Talita Assis, Ana Paula Aguiar, |
| Article published: 'Projected strengthening of Amazonian dry season by constrained climate model simulations' The vulnerability of Amazonian rainforest, and the ecological services it provides, depends on an adequate supply of dry-season water, either as precipitation or stored soil moisture. How the rain-bearing South American monsoon will evolve across the twenty-first century is thus a question of major interest. Extensive savanization, with its loss of forest carbon stock and uptake capacity, is an extreme although very uncertain scenario. We show that the contrasting rainfall projections simulated for Amazonia by 36 global climate models (GCMs) can be reproduced with empirical precipitation models, calibrated with historical GCM data as functions of the large-scale circulation. A set of these simple models was therefore calibrated with observations and used to constrain the GCM simulations. In agreement with the current hydrologic trends, the resulting projection towards the end of the twenty-first century is for a strengthening of the monsoon seasonal cycle, and a dry-season lengthening in southern Amazonia. With this approach, the increase in the area subjected to lengthy-savannah-prone-dry seasons is substantially larger than the GCM-simulated one. Our results confirm the dominant picture shown by the state-of-the-art GCMs, but suggest that the ‘model democracy’ view of these impacts can be significantly underestimated. Nature Climate Change, |
| Day 2 of the joint AMAZALERT and ROBIN meeting On Tuesday October 7, around 80 people from the scientific community gathered in the meeting room of the Borari Hotel in Alter-do Chao, Brasil. The main objective was to have a joint meeting of AMAZALERT and ROBIN scientists and exchange knowledge. AMAZALERT Secretary, |
| First day of the joint meeting AMAZALERT and ROBIN project On the first day of this joint meeting, Mateus Batistella from Embrapa welcomed the scientific community and the stakeholders in the room of the very nice Embrapa building in Belem, Para, Brasil. He explained why both projects meet together in Brasil, focussing on mayor key points on climate change. AMAZALERT Secretary, |
| CO2, temperature and drought: the three most uncertain natural drivers of amazon forest change Of course, the major factor in Amazon change is deforestation, followed by the vulnerability of forests to fire. But beyond these the direct effects of climate change on the vitality of the Amazon forests are strongly associated with projected changes in atmospheric CO2, temperature and rainfall. At the same time, it turns out that these factors are associated with major uncertainties in the models that are used to forecast forest change.
AMAZALERT Secretary / Bart Kruijt, |