ACID rain, the forgotten scourge of Europe’s forests and lakes, is emerging as a prime threat to biodiversity across the tropics. As countries like India, Brazil and China industrialise, emissions from cars, power stations and factory farms are dousing the rainforests and other biodiversity hotspots in acidic, nitrogen-rich rains that threaten to exterminate thousands of species over the next 50 years.
“Air pollution poses a far greater threat to global biodiversity than previously considered,” says Gareth Phoenix of the University of Sheffield, UK, the author of a study on nitrogen deposition published in the current issue of Global Change Biology…
