Researchers have identified a climate feedback mechanism that could have catastrophic consequences for one of the world’s great rainforests. They report that a dangerous mix of human-induced devastation and cyclic drought in the Amazon could launch a vicious circle of forest dieback. The drought that killed the trees could intensify because of the intricate relationship between the rainforest and the rainfall, in which trees play a role in maintaining a pattern of precipitation by pumping fallen water back into the atmosphere. “We already know that, on the one hand, reduced rainfall increases the risk of forest dieback, and, on the other hand, forest loss can intensify regional droughts. So more droughts can lead to less forest, leading to more droughts, and so on,” says Delphine Clara Zemp, of Germany’s Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, who led the international team of scientists behind the finding. Amazon forest loss “Yet the consequences of this feedback between the plants on the ground and the atmosphere above them so far was not clear. Our study provides new insight into this issue, highlighting the risk of self-amplifying forest loss, which comes on top of the forest loss directly caused by the rainfall reduction.” Dr Zemp and other scientists from Germany, the Netherlands, Sweden and Brazil report in Nature Communications that their results suggest frequent extreme drought events in…