Recent drying over the Amazon could be the “first warning signal” that the rainforest is approaching a tipping point, new research says.
The Amazon is the largest rainforest in the world and receives 2-3 metres of rain every year. However, intensifying droughts and human-driven deforestation mean parts of the forest are beginning to dry out.
The study, published in Science Advances, finds that deforestation is delaying the start of the South American monsoon, leading to reduced rainfall over the Amazon.
The authors warn that continued deforestation could push the region past a tipping point in which a further, rapid reduction in rainfall would kill vast swathes of trees.
Over the past 40 years, the Amazon’s dry season has already become longer, the paper finds. This might be the early warning signal that the combined rainforest and South American monsoon systems are approaching a critical threshold, the authors say.
The authors also stress the importance of ongoing experimental work to quantify the impacts of increasing temperature and CO2 on the Amazon rainforest, so that scientists can produce more accurate models of the links between deforestation and rainfall.
Amazon water cycle
The Amazon is the largest rainforest in the world.
The region contains around 400bn trees and is home to at least 10% of the world’s known species. It is also a key carbon store, holding more than 120bn tonnes of carbon in its vegetation and soil.
Tropical rainforests are warm and humid all year round. The Amazon basin receives around 2-3 metres of rainfall every year on average. It “recycles” much of this rainfall back into the atmosphere through evapotranspiration – the movement of water from the land to the atmosphere through a combination of evaporation and transpiration.
Much of this rainfall comes from the South American monsoon, which is driven in part by the temperature difference between the warm Amazon rainforest and cooler Atlantic ocean.
However, as droughts become more intense and frequent, the humid Amazon climate is beginning to dry, killing trees or making them less resilient to future changes. The ongoing drying trend is exacerbated by deforestation and wildfires.
Around 20% of the Amazon has already been deforested and a further 6% is “highly degraded”.
Dr David Lapola is a research scientist at the State University of Campinas in Brazil and a Carbon Brief contributing editor. Lapola, who was not involved in the study, tells Carbon Brief that the Southern and south-eastern Amazon are “currently experiencing a crisis in terms of changing climate and land use”.
Scientists have warned for decades that human-caused climate change could push key components of the Earth system – such as ice sheets, rainforests and monsoons – past critical thresholds and into new states.
Identifying these “tipping points” is an active area of research.
Previous studies suggest that the Amazon could be pushed beyond its tipping point if forest loss exceeds 40%. At this level of deforestation, evapotranspiration in the Amazon would reduce significantly, leading more trees to die from lack of water.
This self-perpetuating cycle could see large areas of tropical forest turn into dry grasslands in just decades, in a process called “dieback”.
Deforestation
To investigate the link between Amazon deforestation and rainfall, the study authors produce a model of moisture transport across South America that simulates how air moves through the Amazon. The model includes key feedbacks between vegetation, soil moisture and the atmosphere.
The authors find that deforestation reduces the amount of water released into the atmosphere through evapotranspiration. The drop in atmospheric moisture drives a reduction in rainfall.
To form raindrops, water vapour in the atmosphere condenses into liquid water, releasing energy in the form of heat. The reduction in rainfall means that less energy is released in this way, limiting warming in the atmosphere above the region.
As a result, the temperature difference between the warm Amazon rainforest and cooler Atlantic ocean becomes less pronounced. This can cause delays in the onset of the Amazon’s wet season and a lengthening of the dry season, resulting in drier soils and higher tree mortality.
Overall, this feedback means that deforestation in the Amazon weakens the South American monsoon, further reducing rainfall over the Amazon.
Prof Dominick Spracklen is a professor of biosphere-atmosphere interactions at the University of Leeds and co-wrote a “focus” article on the new study.
He tells Carbon Brief that including this complex feedback between the forest and atmosphere makes the rainforest-monsoon system “more sensitive to deforestation, compared to many previous studies that did not include this feedback”.
The graphic below shows the relationship between deforestation and rainfall. The dashed line shows the model used in the study with all feedbacks included, while the solid line shows a model which does not include the atmosphere-vegetation feedbacks.
The study authors find that if deforestation crosses a “critical threshold”, rainfall could drop by 30-50% over just a few years, pushing the system past a tipping point and damaging or killing large areas of the forest.
The model shows that Amazon rainfall is more sensitive to deforestation when key feedbacks between the atmosphere and vegetation are taken into account. This indicates that the tipping point could be crossed sooner than previously thought, the authors warn.
Dr Nils Bochow – a researcher at the Arctic University of Norway and co-author of the study – tells Carbon Brief that “changes in the South American monsoon have a strong influence on the rainforest and vice-versa”. He adds:
“If we do not include these interactions and feedbacks, then we might strongly underestimate the response of the rainforest. This might give a false sense of security or undermine the urgency to act.”
Early warning signs
If an Amazon tipping point is crossed, large sections of lush rainforest could transform into a dry savannah. This process of “savanisation” would take decades to take full effect, but once underway the process is difficult to reverse. The knock-on impacts for the rest of the planet could be profound.
“Tipping points are notoriously hard to understand or predict,” Spracklen tells Carbon Brief.
However, he says there are often early warning signs when a tipping point is approaching. He likens these to the wobble of a spinning top before it falls over.
After using the models to determine what this “wobble” would look like in the Amazon, the authors analyse decades of ERA5 reanalysis data to search for it.
The map below shows the change in soil moisture between 1979 and 2019. Red indicates a drying trend over the four-decade period, while blue indicates wetting.
The authors find that over 1979-2019, soil in the Amazon has become drier. They also find that the dry season now lasts between five and 15 days longer than it used to – meaning that the region is receiving less rainfall, on average, than it was four decades ago.
This indicates that the monsoon-rainforest system has been losing stability in the last decades, the authors say. This might be the first warning signal that a tipping point is approaching, they add.
“The results of this study underline the need to double down on efforts to stop deforestation and help the Amazon region develop in a way that does not lead to additional deforestation,” Spracklen tells Carbon Brief.
Forest loss in the Amazon is beginning to slow. Deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon fell by at least 60% in July 2023 compared to the same month last year, after a new administration led by Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva took power in Brazil.
Leaders of the eight Amazon basin countries met in August 2023 to agree on the need to sustainably develop while preventing further deforestation in the region, and formally recognised that the Amazon is approaching a tipping point.
Model uncertainty
This study is “one of the first” to simulate the feedbacks between the monsoon and Amazon, according to the study authors.
Bochow tells Carbon Brief that including these “non-linear” components is key, because when small changes “reinforce each other” they can lead to significant impacts.
However, the model is unable to account for everything. Most notably, it does not include the impact of rising CO2 levels or temperatures on the forest. This omission is a notable “gap” in the study, according to Lapola.
He tells Carbon Brief that elevated CO2 levels can have a significant impact on the forest through changing evapotranspiration levels, reducing rainfall and inducing plants to use water more efficiently.
Lapola adds:
“[We should] have more experimental studies, in which we manipulate the ecosystem to test its limits in terms of resilience – for example, testing [the effects of] higher temperature and CO2.”
Spracklen tells Carbon Brief that researchers need more observational data, but warns that observations also have their “limitations”. A combination of observations and models are needed to make better predictions, he says.
Bochow points out that climate models show “a big spread in the response of the Amazon rainforest to climate change and deforestation” and agrees that there is an “urgent need to constrain the models better by doing more field experiments and observations”.
He also emphasises that “the exact numbers of our model are not to be taken for granted”. He tells Carbon Brief:
“The model simulations are used as guidance where to look for characteristic changes of stability loss in observations. Our study really focuses on the observed changes in the historical data and these do not depend on our employed model.”
The post Drying of Amazon could be early warning of ‘tipping point’ for the rainforest appeared first on Carbon Brief.
Drying of Amazon could be early warning of ‘tipping point’ for the rainforest
The launch of the Africa Energy Bank (AEB) has been put back yet again, raising doubts about the institution’s future ability to finance fossil fuel projects – its main objective – as global lenders retreat from such investments over climate concerns, experts told Climate Home News.
The bank, which had been billed to launch in September after a series of delays, is now scheduled to begin operations in November, according to the head of the African Energy Chamber, an advocacy body for the continent’s oil and gas sector.
Even as the world aims to transition away from fossil fuels, many African leaders have made clear they want to continue exploring and extracting the continent’s large oil and gas deposits – estimated at around 125 billion barrels of crude and over 600 trillion cubic feet of gas – to boost economic development.
As a group, Africa sided with a number of powerful oil-and-gas producing nations in blocking progress on negotiations to craft a global roadmap to transition away from fossil fuels at last year’s UN COP30 climate talks, although some countries did individually support the proposal.
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Meanwhile, major projects under development across the continent – including the 1,443-km East African Crude Oil Pipeline (EACOP) and Dangote’s 700,000-barrel-per-day Kenyan refinery – show that African governments see oil and gas as playing a significant role in meeting their energy and economic needs for many years to come.
In 2022, at a gathering of the African Petroleum Producers’ Organization (APPO) in oil-rich Angola, ministers from its member states adopted a resolution to create the Africa Energy Bank to finance projects for the production, use and trade of oil, gas and broader energy sources.
African control over energy resources
An article on the APPO website explains that the bank was conceived as a way to overcome “disenchantment” with fossil fuels among “the international community” which it said had crystallised around the “energy transition” concept.
“If Western countries, after having long taken advantage of the energy sources they now revile to develop, can afford the luxury of abandoning them, this is not the case in Africa,” it adds, noting that many of the continent’s economies are still largely dependent on oil and gas revenues.
A separate web page about the bank, also hosted on APPO’s website, says its objectives include financing the exploration, production and refining of oil and gas, as well as supporting member states in transitioning from fossil fuels to cleaner energy sources “while ensuring energy security”.
Said Addi, a former executive with Shell and energy commodities trading house Gunvor, said the new bank was judged necessary because financing for hydrocarbons from many traditional international lenders has become constrained.
In trying to fill this financing gap, Africa is not simply setting up another fund to support oil and gas, he added. “It is also an attempt to give African countries greater control over how their energy resources and infrastructure are financed,” he explained.
Nigeria to host the AEB
The energy bank – a joint initiative of APPO and the African Export–Import Bank (Afreximbank) – has so far suffered several delays and is almost two years behind schedule. The initial plan was to start operations in January 2025, with Nigeria as the host country, but the bank’s opening was delayed to June of that year to allow Nigeria time to finalise the construction of the bank’s headquarters in Abuja.
After the government announced the completion of the offices in late November 2025, a new launch date was set for January 2026, which was moved back to April, June and then September. Now it has shifted again to November, raising concerns that the institution may be losing momentum.
Former Shell executive Addi said that if the capital is eventually paid in, the bank becomes operational and its first projects are commercially credible, then the delays will be regarded as normal teething troubles in setting up a multilateral institution. But, he added, scepticism will be justified if it continues to stall.
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Baron Lamarré, an oil and gas expert and former Petronas oil trader, said that missing “three deadlines in a row is not normal”, and warned that if the timeline slips again, “the story flips from ‘ambitious institution finding its footing’ to ‘good idea that lost momentum before it found any’.”
The Nigerian government, APPO and Afreximbank did not respond to requests for comment by the time of publication.
The funding challenge
The Africa Energy Bank is targeting base capital of $5 billion, with plans to scale up to $120 billion within five years by mobilising private-sector funds. However, it is expected to start operations with initial seed capital of $500 million.
The funding plan is to have the 18 member countries of the APPO contribute $83 million each to the bank as equity for a combined $1.5 billion. Afreximbank, other non-APPO African countries and investors outside the continent are expected to provide the remaining $3.5 billion.
But even the initial $500 million has not been easy to mobilise. In May, APPO Secretary-General Farid Ghezali called on members to deliver on their pledges towards the startup goal before the end of June. But the delays suggest this may not have been met, with experts saying Africa may be finding it difficult to self-fund its oil and gas projects in the absence of international capital.
Lamarré said every extension of the deadline points to the fact that “raising fossil fuel capital in Africa without the majors and their financing networks is brutally hard”.
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Since 2020, Western lenders, export credit agencies and insurers have been in steady retreat from African hydrocarbons, he said, while oil majors are divesting their African assets, handing over fields to smaller local operators whose credit ratings are not high enough to borrow cheaply.
Even capital from China and the Gulf, which has partially filled the gap, cannot match the volume, tenor or pricing that Western investors once offered, Lamarré argued.
“If mobilising the first $500 million of seed capital [for the AEB] has taken this long, that’s the clearest signal yet of how steep the climb to $120 billion looks,” he said, noting that the continent’s energy financing gap is as large as $30 billion-$45 billion per year.
Africa’s investment landscape, meanwhile, has been shifting. While foreign direct investment dropped from a 2024 peak, inflows remained roughly one-third above the continent’s long-term average in 2025, according to the 2026 World Investment Report from UN Trade and Development (UNCTAD). They are concentrated in a few sectors including critical minerals needed for renewable energy technologies, battery manufacturing and advanced industrial production.
At the same time, data on global energy investment from the International Energy Agency (IEA) shows that fossil fuel investment in Africa has declined over the last decade.
“Trojan horse” for fossil fuels
While the Africa Energy Bank struggles to get off the ground, climate campaigners have criticised its primary aim of financing oil and gas on the continent at a time when the world is starting to move away from high-carbon fuels to cleaner alternatives.
Bhekumuzi Dean Bhebhe, founder of Africa Change Lab, described the bank as a “Trojan horse”, arguing that its focus on fossil fuel financing runs counter to the global energy transition and the African Union’s Agenda 2063 goals of sustainable development and inclusive growth.
The energy bank, he warned, “risks locking Africa into a new cycle of debt, dependency and fossil fuel entrenchment”, adding that its financing blueprint does not pave the way for a climate-resilient future. “In truth, it is to deepen the same extractive, carbon-heavy pathways that the continent should be moving away from,” he added.
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Kenya-based climate and energy expert Joab Okanda said the AEB’s plan to finance oil and gas is “a misplaced priority” and it should instead back clean energy in line with the policies of some of Africa’s major export markets like Europe.
In addition, the new bank could struggle to mobilise enough resources to advance large-scale oil and gas projects, he added, noting that its proposed $5-billion initial capital is equivalent to the cost of the East African Crude Oil Pipeline alone.
The AEB’s aim of backing more fossil fuels should be flipped “to support countries that are oil-dependent to start working on their transition plans”, Okanda said.
The post Launch of Africa Energy Bank delayed again in blow to oil and gas hopes appeared first on Climate Home News.
Launch of Africa Energy Bank delayed again in blow to oil and gas hopes
A booklet published by the UK’s opposition Conservative party includes a “cost of net-zero” that appears to have been doubled by a spreadsheet error.
The “common sense” policy document argues that “what people ultimately want is a government competent enough to solve the problems for which it takes responsibility”.
In a section that says “sophisticat[ed]…modelling” should not be a substitute for “political judgement”, the “Right Way” document disparages various estimates of the cost of net-zero.
The Conservative document then claims – incorrectly – that the government’s official adviser, the Climate Change Committee (CCC), had put the cost of net-zero at close to £1tn. It says:
“In 2020, the CCC estimated that its route to net-zero would cost £957bn.”
In fact, the CCC’s 2020 estimate was exactly half this amount – £478bn – and last year it published a revised figure of £108bn, largely as a result of the falling cost of electric vehicles (EVs).
Spreadsheet error
The Conservative party’s erroneous claim appears to stem from another report that had accidentally added up numbers twice, using a spreadsheet published by the CCC in 2020.
The 2020 spreadsheet contains a table listing the additional investments that would be needed to build a net-zero economy, from low-carbon electricity generation through to heat pumps and EVs.
These extra capital expenditures, listed as “CAPEX”, add up to a total of £1.38tn over the 30 years of 2020-50. They are set against operational savings, listed as “OPEX”, of £0.90tn.
Added up over 2020-50, the combined CAPEX and OPEX figures come to a total of £478bn.
In addition to the annual sectoral CAPEX and OPEX figures, the CCC’s 2020 spreadsheet also has a line giving combined totals for each year. It appears that someone has added all of these numbers together, resulting in the savings and costs being counted twice.
This double-counted total for the cost of net-zero amounts to £957bn – as shown in the image below – and it appears to be the source of the claim in the Conservative booklet.
At the time of publication in 2020, the CCC said that the £478bn net cost of net-zero amounted to less than 1% of GDP over 30 years – and that the large investment needed would not only result in savings due to lower fossil-fuel imports, but that it would boost GDP overall, by around 2%.
In 2025, the CCC revised its estimates for investment costs and operating savings to £670bn and £562bn respectively, giving a net total of £108bn over 2025-50, or less than 0.2% of GDP.
Earlier this year, the committee said that cutting emissions to net-zero would cost less than a single fossil-fuel price shock and that doing so would have benefits worth £110bn per year.
Paper trail
The erroneous claim in the Conservative document is referenced to the CCC’s 2020 advice on the UK’s sixth “carbon budget”, which, as explained, does not contain the £957bn figure.
The earliest online use of the £957bn figure found by Carbon Brief is a 12 January 2026 article in the Spectator, by retired engineer and self-described “accidental energy analyst” David Turver.
A day later, Turver repeated the mistaken number in a report for the free-market Institute of Economic Affairs. His report cites figure 5.3 of the CCC’s 2020 advice.
However, as set out above, the CCC spreadsheet containing the data for figure 5.3 only adds up to £478bn, half the figure claimed by Turver.
It appears that Turver accidentally added up all of the numbers in the CCC spreadsheet, without noting that it already included a line for the annual total. This results in double-counting the cost.
(Turver’s report also triggered a slew of inaccurate headlines stating that net-zero would cost £7.6tn – or even £9tn. These figures, which came from Turver’s report, were based, among other things, on the implicit assumption that fossil fuels and the cars, boilers and power plants that use them are all free.)
After Turver’s report and article in January 2026, the erroneous £957bn figure was repeated in March by the Great British Think Tank. The organisation has the tagline “data, not vibes” and says of its work: “Every figure [is] sourced from official public bodies.”
The £957bn figure then appeared in the Conservative “Right Way” document in October 2026.