Q&A: Amazon rainforest "on the verge of point of no return"

• Deforestation and fast warming dry up the rainforest
• In 2024, Amazon faced record drought and wildfires
• Only a third of forest left by 2100 under current trends

RIO DE JANEIRO - As Brazil prepares to host the COP30 climate summit in the Amazon, rampant deforestation, record wildfires and heat are posing unprecedented challenges to the world's largest tropical rainforest - making for a perfect storm at November's summit.

Context spoke to Carlos Nobre, a prominent Brazilian climate scientist, about the dangers now facing the rainforest and the signs of a tipping point from which there is no way back.

Nobre has been warning since the early 1990s that deforestation and climate change could push the forest past a point of no return, which would see most of the forest dry up and die out into a degraded, more flammable savannah.

Nobre sat down with Context in his office in São José dos Campos, Brazil, to explain where we are at now, three months ahead of the world's next big climate get-together:

What is the point of no return?

The Amazon's dry season lasts three, four months and it still rains a lot.

But in 2016, I published a study showing that if deforestation exceeds 20% to 25%, and warming surpasses 2 degrees - boom, the forest passes the tipping point, it won't come back.

The dry season in the entire Southern Amazon will last six months, which is the length of the dry season of the tropical savannah, the Cerrado (biome).

So we are very close, right - 18% of the entire Amazon has been deforested, and unfortunately, 32% to 33% is degraded.

In 2024 research, which I participated in, shows that under the current trajectory, we'll reach the point of no return by 2050 and you will have self-degradation of at least 50%, most likely 70% of the forest by 2100.

Forests will continue to exist only along the Andes (mountain range), maybe a little bit on the Atlantic coast.

Are there signs this is happening now?

In the past, we had one intense drought every 20 years.

Nowadays, we've had four in 20 years - 2005, 2010, 2015-2016 and 2023-2024, which was a historical record.

This has to do with global warming.

Many scientists say that the point of no return has already passed in the Southeast Amazon, where the forest no longer removes carbon dioxide from the atmosphere in almost every year - it emits carbon dioxide.

Droughts are getting stronger, as in 2024, which broke all records of forest fires.

So we are, so to speak, on the verge of the point of no return.

And it's all crimes, do you understand? More than 95% of fires are of human origin, not lightning strikes.

In my opinion, last year's fires were caused by the people who have always deforested the Amazon to clear land for the illegal land market.

What are the risks for Brazil and the world?

We will lose the greatest biodiversity on the planet, and maintain only a degraded savannah, releasing about 250 billion tons of carbon dioxide, making it impossible to keep global warming at 1.5 degrees.

Almost 45% of the water vapour entering from the Atlantic Ocean is exported outside the Amazon through "flying rivers".

Trees take water from the soil through their roots, then leaves transpire vapour that condenses, forms clouds and rains five to seven times, supplying almost 40% of rains in Southern Brazil and not less than 15% in the Southeast.

It is not only the Amazon that is on the verge of the point of no return, the Cerrado, the Pantanal and the Caatinga (biomes) are all in a critical situation too.

With those changes you can forget about Brazil remaining as the fourth largest food producer in the world, and the second exporter.

It is absurd that Brazil's agribusinesses don't pay attention to science and don't see the risk they are running.

(Reporting by Andre Cabette Fabio; Editing by Anastasia Moloney and Lyndsay Griffiths.)