Amazon in Peril

he Amazon River Basin is the largest drainage basin on the planet, covering an area almost the size of the contiguous United States as it sprawls across nine nations and many Indigenous territories. Home to one-fifth of the planet’s liquid fresh water, it is a forest and freshwater ecosystem so important to world carbon and meteorological cycles that it’s sometimes called “the lungs of the planet.” As the planet’s climate changes, the basin’s importance has only grown: The Amazon forest accounts for about one-fourth of all the carbon dioxide absorbed by all rainforests on Earth.

But the last three decades have seen a crisis in Amazonia. Erratic water levels in the Amazon River—lower than at any time in the past century—are combining with deforestation, wildfires and water pollution to upset the natural balance between forest, rivers and people. Climate change is amplifying major events like El Niños, droughts and wildfires. And thinning forest cover is hurting the local water cycle by reducing the region’s ability to produce its own rain events. Some scientists now fear that the rainforest is poised to lose its ability to absorb more carbon than it releases, meaning the forest basin could become another driver of climate change.

Silvia Benitez, freshwater director of the Latin American Region for The Nature Conservancy, and a team of conservation scientists recently released a technical report that models the future impacts of climate change on Amazonia. The data predicts even more erratic rainfall and river levels in the coming decades.