Fundacion Entropika
For 30 years climatologists have questioned what would happen to rainfall over the Amazon Basin were the forest to go, ripped up for cattle pasture, for soya, for timber or as a result of dramatic changes to the air mass circulation brought about through global warming and the continuing, business-as-usual, emissions of greenhouse gases. Would rainfall decline significantly? Could it even go up over the Andes, as the air mass system, embodied in the Hadley Cell Circulation, passed unheeded across the thousands of kilometres of the Basin?Most climatological studies of the Amazon Basin, such as those of the UK’s Hadley Centre indicate that deforestation would have little effect along the eastern region of the Basin and at worst would bring about a 15 to 20 per cent reduction in rainfall – one millimetre less than the 5.8 millimetres daily average – in the central and western part. Drastic, yes, but not completely catastrophic.
That view has now been challenged. Scientists at the Theoretical Physics Division of the St Petersburg Nuclear Physics Institute, conclude that the loss of the Amazon rainforests, for whatever underlying cause, would be disastrous in the extreme, threatening much of South America with unprecedented drought, and leading to desertification in the central and western part of the Amazon Basin, with repercussions right up into the Andes and beyond. If they are right, the very existence of the major river-forming system in the upper moorlands, the páramos, would be threatened, with horrendous consequences for the generation of fresh water resources in countries such as Colombia, Peru and Ecuador, let alone in Brazil. [Read more]
Fundacion Entropika is a local non-profit conservation organisation aiming to make a difference in the Southern Colombian Amazon by collaborating closely with local indigenous people, governmental environmental organisations and local, national and international NGOs to implement sustainable conservation programmes through research, education, cooperation and commitment.
