Stuart Brocklehurst, at COP30 in Belém, talks to Professor Richard Betts from the University of Exeter and Met Office about the AmazonFACE project, for which he is UK Co-Lead for Science
SB: My first question, Richard, is what is AmazonFACE?
RB: AmazonFACE is in international collaboration between scientists in Brazil, the UK and several other countries to conduct a huge and ambitious study in the Amazon rainforest where we are actually doing an experiment on the forest itself. It’s a set of towers in rings, and each tower is 30 metres high. The rings are 30 metres-wide and the cranes are 50 metres tall. Through these rings, the towers are releasing carbon dioxide into the forest in order to study the response of the forest to the high levels of carbon dioxide that we expect to see in the future.
This is so that we can understand better how the forest will respond to climate change.
SB: What sort of results would we see from this project, and when? How long will it take to get those results?
RB: It’s almost operational now. We’ve been building it over the last three years. As I say, it’s incredibly ambitious and technically challenging as well. We hope it’ll start operationally early next year, but it will probably take 10 years. We’ll get some results fairly soon actually, so within weeks we’ll possibly get some early signs. But really to get the type of results that we’re looking for is going to be several years – ideally 10 years.
It’s going to look at all the ways in which the forest will respond to high levels of carbon dioxide. So most people know that, generally speaking, plants will grow better under conditions of high carbon dioxide, but a lot of the knowledge we have on that comes from laboratory conditions; very enclosed and controlled conditions in farming and in greenhouses as well. We need to look at it in the real world.
Prof Richard Betts (l) and Stuart Brocklehurst
There have been other experiments like this in other forests in the world: there’s one in the UK in Staffordshire, there’s one in Australia, in Sydney, and one in the US. These experiments have shown that in many cases, the growth of forest does not increase so much as you might expect with much higher levels of carbon dioxide, because of certain constraints, such as not enough nutrients in the soil, or it being open to the elements so it’s affected by the weather and other factors such as insects or diseases coming in. We need to utilise this real world environment to really see what the response to climate change looks like and then improve our models.
SB: And how does this impact on our ability to model climate change?
RB: So it’ll give us more confidence in our future predictions of climate change, particularly the future strength of land carbon sinks. This is really crucial. Under the Paris Agreement, we are aiming to limit global to well below 2 degrees and pursue efforts to limit warming to 1.5 degrees. We’re inevitably going to overshoot 1.5 now – we’re at about 1.4 degrees already, so 1.5 is not very far away. But if we want to work out how much carbon we can emit to stay as close to 1.5 degrees as possible, we need to know how much of our emissions will be re-absorbed into forests like the Amazon rainforest, and we can only do that confidently if we’ve got these experiments to prove it.
Also, if we do overshoot 1.5 degrees of warming and then try and get back down to it to reduce global temperatures, we’ll need to actively take carbon out of the atmosphere, so again we’ll need to know how much we can take up through forests in that way. So it’s going to be crucial, globally important science coming out this experiment.
SB: It’s a really fascinating project. Thank you.