Experts are warning that the Amazon could soon reach a tipping point, crossing of which would trigger dieback and turn much of the forest to savannah, with major impacts on biodiversity, global carbon storage and climate change.

“The Amazon rainforest is a highly complex system, so it’s very difficult to predict if and when a tipping point could be reached,” said Dr Chris Boulton, of Exeter University’s Global Systems Institute.

“We now have satellite data on the Amazon that covers a sufficiently long timespan to observe changes in resilience. Our study looked in detail at month-to-month changes as the forest responded to fluctuating weather conditions.

“We studied metrics that are theoretically related to the rate of recovery after perturbations (external events that affect the forest), to see how the resilience of the Amazon ecosystem has changed in recent decades. Resilience dropped during the major droughts of 2005 and 2010, as part of an ongoing decline from the early 2000s to the most recent data in 2016.

“As a result, we would expect the forest to recover more slowly from a drought now than it would have twenty years ago.”

The research was carried out by the University of Exeter, the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK) and Technical University of Munich