This policy brief presents the level of emissions from understory forest wildfires in the Amazon as a way to highlight the urgent need to protect the carbon sink and storage potential, a critical function of the Amazonian rainforests, which has been diminished.
The gathering firestorm in southern Amazonia
Wildfires, exacerbated by extreme weather events and land use, threaten to change the Amazon from a net carbon sink to a net carbon source. Here, we develop and apply a coupled ecosystem-fire model to quantify how greenhouse gas–driven drying and warming would...

