Destruction of rainforest for cattle ranching is making the Amazon biome more vulnerable to irreversible collapse, which could occur within decades if deforestation continues.

A landmark 2022 on tipping points found the Amazon would likely suffer widespread dieback at global warming of 3.5°C and potentially as low as 2°C. That’s worrying, as estimates put Earth on track to warm by about 2.6°C to 2.7°C above pre-industrial temperatures by 2100. But the research didn’t include deforestation, which has already resulted in the loss of at least 15 per cent of the Amazon.

at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany and his colleagues have now modelled Amazon dieback with scenarios involving both rising global temperatures and severe deforestation until 2050. If total forest loss increases to 22 per cent, the Amazon could suffer widespread dieback with as little as 1.5°C of global warming, they found. The world has already experienced 1.3°C to 1.4°C of warming and could hit 1.5°C by the end of this decade.

Deforestation slowed last year, but if it resurges, the Amazon could cross a tipping point as soon as 2031. The timing and extent of dieback predicted by the model varied depending on how much carbon humanity emits, with deforestation rates of 22 to 28 per cent leading to 62 to 77 per cent of the Amazon biome becoming grassland, savanna or scrubby forest.

“We found that there’s this about-2-degree reduction of the critical global warming threshold when deforestation is considered,” says Wunderling. “The reason why deforestation is so crucial is that it undermines this atmospheric moisture recycling feedback.”

Vast atmospheric rivers carry moisture from the Atlantic Ocean across the Amazon. After rain falls on one part of the forest, the trees transpire some of that moisture back into the air, which carries it to another part to repeat the process. Up to 50 per cent of the rainfall in the western Amazon is recycled from the forest itself.

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But cutting down areas of the forest reduces this moisture recycling and kills off other areas downwind, which kills off further areas in a domino effect. “It only needs a little bit of a push from global warming to make these cascading transitions possible,” says Wunderling.

While concerning, the findings are based on a high deforestation rate that would eat into areas that are currently protected, according to at the University of Sussex in the UK, who worked on the 2022 tipping point study.

Brazil more than 28,000 square kilometres of primary forest in 2024, equalling its previous record. But it nearly halved that rate in 2025, and President Luiz InĂĄcio Lula da Silva has promised to halt Amazon deforestation by 2030. Achieving that would probably avoid the tipping point even if the world keeps warming.

“Stopping all deforestation is probably optimistic,” Armstrong McKay says. “But even if there is some deforestation continuing, it probably won’t meet this worst-case scenario modelled here.”

All the same, Brazil still lost about 0.5 per cent of its primary forest in 2025. And for the past two years, two-thirds of forest destruction has been due to wildfires, which typically start when farmers burn vegetation in deforested areas but then escape into the neighbouring forest.

Once almost unheard of, wildfires can now spread because the rainforest is hotter and drier, conditions that will be worsened by the El Niño climate phase later this year. As a result, the study may be underestimating the vulnerability of the Amazon, according to at the University of Leeds, UK.

“We’re getting these much bigger fires,” he says. “That is worrying if we have moved into a new kind of regime where that can happen more and more.”

Already, the Amazon has from a carbon sink to a carbon source, and widespread dieback could emit enough carbon to heat the globe by as much as 0.2°C. It would also destroy the world’s biggest store of terrestrial biodiversity.

“We really want to be backing away from that threshold, rather than creeping towards it,” says Spracklen.

Global warming has accelerated and is now happening twice as fast as in previous decades, meaning major climate catastrophes could happen sooner than expected.

Earth was warming by about 0.18°C per decade prior to 2013-14. Since then, it has been heating up by about 0.36°C per decade, according to an analysis by at the University of Potsdam, Germany, and US statistician Grant Foster.

If warming continues at this rate, humanity could breach the Paris Agreement goal of limiting warming to 1.5°C in 2028, even sooner than other research has projected.

“Every tenth of a degree matters and makes the impact of global warming worse in terms of extreme weather events, in terms of ecosystem impacts, also the risk of crossing tipping points,” says Rahmstorf. “The world, apart from the US, is trying to halt global warming, reduce it, and that’s why the fact that it’s now actually doing the opposite, accelerating, is of great concern.”

After a string of record-hot years, climate scientists began widely debating in 2023 whether global warming is speeding up. But natural fluctuations, such as the El Niño climate phase, which caused additional warming in 2023 and 2024, made it difficult to tell if the faster rise in temperatures was due to climate change or just random weather.

Rahmstorf and Foster’s study is the first to find a statistically significant acceleration due to climate change, making that attribution with 98 per cent confidence.

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The team analysed five different datasets of global temperature, some of which show a higher number. According to the analysis of the dataset from the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts, global warming could reach 1.5°C above the preindustrial period this year, based on a 20-year average.

Warm-water coral reefs are starting to collapse, and breaching 1.5°C risks crossing other tipping points like irreversible melting of Greenland and west Antarctica and the dieback of the Amazon rainforest.

Many scientists think the acceleration in global heating was caused mainly by a crackdown in 2020 on sulphur dioxide in shipping emissions. While that substance is harmful to human health, it also formed a haze of aerosols that was blocking sunlight and cooling the planet.

Now that this sunlight has been unblocked, the warming rate may slow down, but it’s hard to say for sure, says Rahmstorf. The transition away from fossil fuels will continue to diminish air pollution that is masking warming.

“There will be further aerosol reductions, [but] probably not as rapid as those shipping emissions were reduced,” he says. “It’s quite possible that the warming rate will be lower in the next decade.”

In addition to El Niño, the authors estimated the effects of volcanic eruptions, which also create sun-blocking haze, and increased solar radiation during cycles of high sunspots. After excluding these effects, they fitted two types of curve to global temperatures, both of which showed an acceleration in warming, although at different times.

It’s unlikely, however, that the researchers were able to completely remove the temperature effects of El Niño, volcanoes and sunspots, according to at Berkeley Earth in California. That means they could be slightly overestimating how much global warming has sped up. But the study does offer convincing proof it has quickened, he says.

“The broader takeaway is that we have strong evidence for acceleration even if we don’t know precisely how much the rate of warming has increased as of yet,” Hausfather says. “We will need to wait a few more years to get more data.”

Life in the Amazon region following total deforestation of its rainforest sounds pretty bleak: dry spells punctuated by bouts of extreme rain; strong winds that stunt any forest regrowth; and rising temperatures that cause heat stress for both people and wildlife.

That is according to research findings that upend the prevailing assumption that removing the rainforest will lead to a drying out of the region’s climate.

Most research predicts a steep reduction in rainfall following deforestation of the Amazon rainforest, but these studies generally use coarse-resolution models that don’t accurately represent convection patterns in the region.

Now, at the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology in Germany and her colleagues have deployed a more advanced climate model to accurately represent rainfall and convection patterns in the rainforest.

at the University of Leeds in the UK, who wasn’t involved in the study, says this approach is “really impressive” and should “better simulate the climate response to deforestation”.

Using this approach, Yoon earlier this year found that after total deforestation in the Amazon, under current climate conditions, . In new work, she takes a closer look at how the hourly patterns of rainfall, heat and wind will change under this complete-deforestation scenario.

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Her team found that the region will have more frequent dry periods and a 54 per cent increase in bouts of violent rainfall, defined as more than 50 millimetres of water falling within an hour. Meanwhile, daily minimum and maximum temperatures will increase by 2.7◩C (4.9◩F) and 5.4◩C (9.7◩F), respectively, significantly raising heat stress for the region’s inhabitants. What’s more, very strong winds will become more common.

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More than 30 million people live in the Amazon region, including about 2.7 million Indigenous people. “You’re going to have more extreme rainfall and more extreme temperatures,” says , also at the University of Leeds. “That is basically horrible for everyone who is there.”

But he cautions that more work is needed to verify the results of this modelling approach. He would also like to see more research into understanding the regional climate impacts of partial deforestation, which is more in line with future projections for the region. “These extreme scenarios are more for scientists to try to understand the signal. But we know it’s not realistic,” says Cattelan.