The Amazon Nears a Tipping Point: How Nature-Based Solutions Are Urgently Needed
Featuring Carlos Nobre
Wednesday, September 24; 9:30 to 10:30 a.m.
The Amazon is the world’s largest rainforest and known as the “lungs of the world,” but it faces unprecedented environmental impacts from climate change, deforestation, biodiversity loss, and extreme weather that could transform the lush rainforest into a dry savannah.
A large portion of the southern Amazon is already very close to a tipping point: the dry season is now four to five weeks lengthier than in the last 45 years, resulting in increased tree mortality. The southeastern forest has become a carbon source, producing more carbon than it captures. However, reversing deforestation and biodiversity loss through nature-based solutions can prevent the Amazon from reaching this tipping point. Speaker Carlos Nobre will address how zero deforestation, large-scale forest restoration, a new socio-bioeconomy of healthy standing forests and flowing rivers, and a combination of Indigenous Peoples’ and local communities’ knowledge with science for innovative technologies, are urgently needed solutions to this crisis.
About the Speaker
Carlos Nobre is an Earth Systems scientist from Brazil. He graduated in Electronics Engineering from the Aeronautics Institute of Technology (ITA), Brazil, in 1974 and obtained a Ph.D. in Meteorology from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), USA, in 1983. He dedicated his scientific career mostly to Amazonian and climate science at Brazil’s National Institutes of Amazonian Research (INPA) and Space Research (INPE). He was Program Scientist of the Large-Scale Biosphere-Atmosphere Experiment in Amazonia (LBA). He is a former National Secretary of R&D of Ministry of Science and Technology of Brazil and former President of the Federal Agency for Post-Graduate Education (CAPES). He is foreign member of the US National Academy of Sciences, member of the Brazilian Academy of Science and of the World Academy of Science. He was awarded the Volvo Environmental Prize in 2016, the Von Humboldt Medal of EGU in 2010 and was one of the authors of IPCC AR4 awarded with the Nobel Peace Prize in 2007. He is presently a senior researcher with the Institute for Advanced Studies, University of São Paulo and the creator of the Amazon Third Way-Amazonia 4.0 Initiative. He is also co-chair of Science Panel for Amazon.
Location Ross Hall