section_path: Conservation and climate change/Impact of early 21st-century Amazon droughts
section_name: Impact of early 21st-century Amazon droughts
paragraph_text: Impact of early 21st-century Amazon droughts
  
  In 2005, parts of the Amazon basin experienced the worst drought in one hundred years, and there were indications that 2006 may have been a second successive year of drought. A 2006 article in the UK newspaper The Independent reported the Woods Hole Research Center results, showing that the forest in its present form could survive only three years of drought. Scientists at the Brazilian National Institute of Amazonian Research argued in the article that this drought response, coupled with the effects of deforestation on regional climate, are pushing the rainforest towards a " tipping point " where it would irreversibly start to die. It concluded that the forest is on the brink of being turned into savanna or desert, with catastrophic consequences for the world's climate. A study published in Nature Communications in October 2020 found that about 40% of the Amazon rainforest is at risk of becoming a savanna-like ecosystem due to reduced rainfall. A study published in Nature climate change provided direct empirical evidence that more than three-quarters of the Amazon rainforest has been losing resilience since the early 2000s, risking dieback with profound implications for biodiversity, carbon storage and climate change at a global scale.
  
  According to the World Wide Fund for Nature, the combination of climate change and deforestation increases the drying effect of dead trees that fuels forest fires.
  
  In 2010, the Amazon rainforest experienced another severe drought, in some ways more extreme than the 2005 drought. The affected region was approximately 3,000,000 km (1,160,000 sq mi) of rainforest, compared with 1,900,000 km (734,000 sq mi) in 2005. The 2010 drought had three epicenters where vegetation died off, whereas in 2005, the drought was focused on the southwestern part. The findings were published in the journal Science. In a typical year, the Amazon absorbs 1.5 gigatons of carbon dioxide; during 2005 instead 5 gigatons were released and in 2010 8 gigatons were released. Additional severe droughts occurred in 2010, 2015, and 2016.
  
  In 2019 Brazil's protections of the Amazon rainforest were slashed, resulting in a severe loss of trees. According to Brazil's National Institute for Space Research (INPE), deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon rose more than 50% in the first three months of 2020 compared to the same three-month period in 2019.
  
  In 2020, a 17 percent rise was noted in the Amazon wildfires, marking the worst start to the fire season in a decade. The first 10 days of August 2020 witnessed 10,136 fires. An analysis of the government figures reflected 81 per cent increase in fires in federal reserves, in comparison with the same period in 2019. However, President Jair Bolsonaro turned down the existence of fires, calling it a "lie", despite the data produced by his own government. Satellites in September recorded 32,017 hotspots in the world's largest rainforest, a 61% rise from the same month in 2019. In addition, October saw a huge surge in the number of hotspots in the forest (more than 17,000 fires are burning in the Amazon's rainforest) – with more than double the amount detected in the same month last year.