Amazon Doom

Dying Forest: One year to save the Amazon

Time is running out for the Amazon rainforest. And the fate of the 'lungs of the world' will take your breath away

Report by Geoffrey Lean in Manaus

Published: 23 July 2006

Deep in the heart of the world's greatest rainforest, nine days' journey by boat from the sea, Otavio Luz Castello is anxiously watching the soft waters of the Amazon drain away. Every day they recede further, like water running slowly out of an unimaginably immense bath, threatening a global catastrophe.

He pointed out what was happening on Wednesday, standing on an island in a quiet channel of the giant river. Just a month ago, he explained, it had been entirely under water. Now it was jutting a full 15 feet above it.

It is a sign that severe drought is returning to the Amazon for a second successive year. And that would be ominous indeed. For, as we report on page 12 today, new research suggests that just one further dry year beyond that could tip the whole vast forest into a cycle of destruction.

Just the day before, top scientists had been delivering much the same message at a remarkable floating symposium on the Rio Negro, on whose strange black waters this capital city of the Amazon stands. They told the meeting - convened on a flotilla of boats by Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew of the Greek Orthodox Church, dubbed the "green Pope" for his environmental activism - that global warming and deforestation were rapidly pushing the entire enormous area towards a "tipping point", where it would irreversibly start to die.

The consequences would be truly awesome. The wet Amazon, the planet's greatest celebration of life, would turn to dry savannah at best, desert at worst. This would cause much of the world - including Europe - to become hotter and drier, making this sweltering summer a mild foretaste of what is to come. In the longer term, it could make global warming spiral out of control, eventually making the world uninhabitable.

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