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The Amazon, often called the "lungs of the planet," is the world's largest tropical forest, playing a crucial role in the global climate system due to its vast carbon storage. While it is typically warm and humid all year round, continued climate change poses the threat of more frequent and severe droughts and heat extremes.

A study published in Nature Communications delves into future projections of the Amazon carbon cycle, focusing specifically on the impacts driven by climate change.

Scientists use the latest generation of Earth system models from the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project, which contributed to the IPCC's Sixth Assessment Report.

In the study framework, the climate change impacts are isolated from other factors such as land-use changes, including deforestation, and the CO 2 fertilization effect on photosynthesis. An advanced technique known as Emergent Constraints that allows reducing uncertainties in future predictions using past observations is employed.

The study shows that future climate change may lead to hotter and drier conditions in the Amazon rainforest that reduces the Amazon carbon sink, in other words, carbon dioxide absorption by plants. The lead author, Dr. Irina Melnikova, a research associate at NIES, said that "this happens because global warming is accompanied by a phenomenon known as polar amplification—greater warming in polar regions compared to others."

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