Michael Mann:
Yeah. Well, it's important in lots of ways, obviously. The Amazon is a source of extensive biodiversity. Many of the medicines that we've developed in, you know, in recent time have come, for example, from plants that grow in that unique environment.
But when it comes to the climate crisis, the Amazon is one of the most important carbon sinks on the planet, it literally sucks carbon out of the atmosphere, and it buries it beneath the ground in its root systems and in the leaf litter that's get gets buried. And so, it's a very important way that the Earth system has to moderate the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere of carbon dioxide.
And when we destroy rainforests, when we deforest, when we burn the wood, when we clear it, that puts carbon back into the atmosphere. And so there have been some estimates that if we continue on the course that we've been on in recent decades, then the Amazon rainforest will go from being in a very important carbon sink, it's helping take carbon out of the atmosphere, it will become a carbon source, it will actually be adding to the net carbon pollution in the atmosphere. So, it's critical that we reverse course, and stop the continued destruction of this very important component of the Earth system.
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