A recent study has found that forests and other land ecosystems have failed to curb climate change in 2023, as intense drought in the Amazon rainforest and record wildfires in Canada hampered their ability to absorb carbon dioxide, resulting in a record amount of carbon dioxide entering the atmosphere last year, which further feeds global warming.
Forests and other land ecosystems, on average, absorb nearly a third of annual emissions from fossil fuels, industry, and other human causes. Plant life helps slow climate change by absorbing huge amounts of carbon dioxide, the main greenhouse gas driving global warming.
However, in 2023, that carbon sink collapsed, according to a study of the Laboratory for Climate and Environmental Sciences (LSCE), a French research organization.
“The sink is a pump, and we are pumping less carbon from the atmosphere into the land,” said study coauthor Philippe Ciais. “Suddenly the pump is choking, and it’s pumping less.”
As a result, the growth rate of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere jumped 86 percent in 2023 compared to 2022, the researchers said.
A major driver was record high temperatures globally that dried out vegetation, preventing them from taking up more carbon while at the same time fueling record fires.
The study is still in the process of peer review with an academic journal, but three scientists who were not involved in the research said that its conclusions were sound, saying that dips in land carbon sinks tend to happen in years affected by the El Nino climate phenomenon.
The report cautioned that Earth’s carbon sink varies widely year to year, and a single year alone will not spell doom. However, if what was observed in 2023 becomes a trend, then it would be alarming.
All we can do right now is hope that 2023 is not the start of a trend of the plant’s carbon sink losing its capacity due to droughts that dry out vegetation and hampers its capacity to absorb carbon dioxide, because if it is, there is not much we can do about it anymore, especially after having failed to act with urgency despite all the warnings related to global warming and climate change. However, if we are given a reprieve, let us also hope that we learn our lessons from last year and do better to mitigate the destructive effects and impacts of a warming planet, by doing all that is humanly possible to reverse all the damage that human activities have wrought upon the Earth.
In the end, even if the planet warms up, it will survive. However, humans and the civilization they built might not. It is up to us to do what we can to reverse this worrying trend before it becomes irreversible and takes us down with it.*
