Trees are our saviour, but they are dying

M

uch faith in mitigating climate change is put in trees.

The amazing Amazon Forest.

However, the very thing trees help avoid is their undoing.

A warming atmosphere is causing a die-off among trees, particularly among those in the amazing Amazon carbon sink.

A story in The Conversation - “Amazon carbon sink is in decline as trees die off faster” – reports that the Amazon forest covers an area 25 times that of the UK, and spans large parts of nine countries.

“The region contains a fifth of all species on earth, including more than 15,000 types of tree. Its 300 billion trees store 20% of all the carbon in the Earth’s biomass, and each year they actively cycle 18 billion tonnes of carbon, twice as much as is emitted by all the fossil fuels burnt in the world,” it reports.

Professor of Tropical Ecology at University of Leeds, Oliver Phillips, and NERC Research Fellow at University of Leeds, Roel Brienen, has explained the difficulties facing this huge forest, and by implication, the earth.