The Earth’s Largest Rainforest Ceases to Serve as a Carbon Sink
Run an internet search for “Is the Amazon a carbon sink or source” and the results are several articles assuming the wonderous biosphere continues as a carbon sink. Digging deeper down the search results reveals studies stretching back to 2019 indicating that the rainforest in South America was teetering on the brink of flipping from a net negative carbon sink to a positive, carbon emitter.
However, only a very deep dive, depending on the search engine, would eventually reveal that as of 2023, the Amazon rain forest is in fact no longer a carbon sink. The lungs of our glorious planet have lost a principal pocket of relief. Below is the re-republication of the main article on this topic along with the source link.
So what’s the big deal? The Amazon flipped and I didn’t personally notice a difference. Sure, summers are hotter and tend to start earlier. Nothing a monstrous AC unit can’t remedy.
Australian Rainforests Become the First to Emit More Carbon Than They Absorb
A new analysis finds tropical forests in Australia are not taking in enough carbon dioxide to keep up with the emissions from their decaying trunks, holding possible implications for global ecosystems.
Australian Rainforests Become the First to Emit More Carbon Than They Absorb
Well, reading on down the search list, I find articles stating that the Australian forests are now also carbon emitters. Crap. I’m finding this information on the heels of learning that Earth already crossed its first tipping point, the death of the warm water reefs (see the post here and here). So now I realize that two years ago another tipping point was crossed and a thorough internet search still only yields ambivalent headlines.
In other words, how many major planetary environmental catastrophes are going on around me and I’m totally unaware?! My stomach felt heavy. A voice gnaws in me — how hellish will things have to get before I realize the indicators were out there years ago and I just missed them? How many living communities are impacted right now and I just don’t know???
A Need for a Planetary Dashboard
I remembered having a similar feeling, back when I first left home for college and began managing my own budget. Doing so was tough in those days as it was before the age of online banking. I often ran myself into financial crises because I lost track of more than one credit card accounts or didn’t keep my checkbook balanced, and boom — I would receive awful penalty notices. But today, such a scenario is very difficult to repeat. This is because with just a few taps, I can see all of my accounts at a glance. In other words, I have a dashboard. I get notifications, all in one place. It’s easier to drive with a dashboard.
So, I wondered, do we have planetary dashboards?
I ran a search. Nope. Just this:
Planetary Health Dashboard and this Global Climate Dashboard | NOAA Climate.gov.
Maybe if I dig super deep, I thought I’d find something more legit. Something to go on from a glance.
But as of now, I’m not aware that any such dashboards are out there. If it is, then it is certainly not handy.
If someone knows of one, please email me (admin@urbanarktech.org).
The dream of course would be to have multiple dashboards, including one for carbon.
I’d love to have an app on my phone that tracks carbon by continent, region, country, and jurisdcition!
An app like that could be cross referenced with the applicable carbon regulatory schemes to determine which are perhaps most effective.
Then I realized that I’d likely want a biodiversity dashboard too, one that tracks each species extinguished per day, or at this point, per hour, and their locations on the globe. Are we losing more species in the ocean versus land? Cold versus warm waters? Which nearby countries are most at risk of negative impacts?
The best I could find are below, and none integrate information meaningfully in a way that facilitates advocacy and action. Because Urban Ark Tech was founded to indigenize technology, that is re-orient technology to indigenous values that protect planet Earth, we are pursuing a project to address this need: a map and notifications app that integrates climate crises locations, the contact information of the indigenous communities affected, a list of the threatened habitats for those at risk of extinction, estimated time to impact, the contact information of NGOs and local non-profits, and current local and regional policy proposals (including treaties) through which concerned global citizens can advocate. Our hope is to provide a global dashboard that will facilitate partnerships for action.
If you have any suggestions or would like to participate in this effort, please let us know at admin@urbanarktech.org. In terms of understanding the reasons for the need for such an app, please continue to read on below.
Global Protected Areas, Coverage and Effectiveness Dashboard (2025)
Biodiversity Protection and Policy Dashboard (2025)
Drought Drove the Amazon’s 2023 Switch to a Carbon Source
The change was caused by thirsty vegetation taking up less carbon than normal, not by the year’s extended fire season, new research shows.
by Madeline Reinsel25 February 2026
This article is a republication from Drought Drove the Amazon’s 2023 Switch to a Carbon Source – Eos.
Source: AGU Advances
The Amazon is the world’s largest tropical rainforest, typically storing more carbon than it releases into the atmosphere each year. But in 2023, global high-temperature records accompanied droughts and heat waves across South America, disrupting that stable pattern.
Botía et al. combined carbon dioxide measurements and global atmospheric data to calculate the Amazon rainforest’s 2023 carbon balance using several data sources, including vegetation and atmospheric models, remote sensing data of fire emissions, vegetation indices, and proxies for gross primary productivity (a measure of how much carbon an ecosystem takes up for photosynthesis). The researchers compared the Amazon Basin–scale patterns to local flux measurements of carbon dioxide from the Amazon Tall Tower Observatory, located in the central Amazon in northern Brazil.
They found that the forest released between 10 billion and 170 billion kilograms of carbon into the atmosphere in 2023 (including fire-related emissions), turning the ecosystem into a small net carbon emitter. The change was most pronounced in the second half of the year, likely driven by climate warming and high sea surface temperatures in both the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. The warming atmosphere and seas, along with an extended dry season, were likely compounded by the transition from La Niña to El Niño conditions.
However, despite an increase in drought-driven fires in the southern Amazon and an extended fire season, fire-related emissions from the rainforest were within the long-term (2003–2023) average in 2023. This level of fire-related emissions indicated that the rainforest’s change from a carbon sink to a carbon source was caused by the rainforest’s vegetation absorbing less carbon during drought conditions, rather than by fire-induced carbon release.
The rainforest’s record-breaking switch from a carbon absorber to a carbon emitter accounted for up to 30% of worldwide tropical carbon emissions in 2023, the researchers say. The findings suggest that the Amazon could become an overall carbon source faster than previously predicted. However, the authors note that the research so far is not conclusive, and the possibility of the ecosystem recovering exists as well. (AGU Advances, https://doi.org/10.1029/2025AV001658, 2026)
—Madeline Reinsel, Science Writer
Citation: Reinsel, M. (2026), Drought drove the Amazon’s 2023 switch to a carbon source, Eos, 107, https://doi.org/10.1029/2026EO260059. Published on 25 February 2026.
Text © 2026. AGU. CC BY-NC-ND 3.0:
Admin’s Notes: In other news….
Parts of the Amazon managed by Indigenous people removed more carbon dioxide from the atmosphere than they released, while areas not managed by Indigenous people saw widespread deforestation, producing more carbon dioxide than they removed, a report finds.
Indigenous Lands Among the Amazon’s Last Carbon Sinks – Yale E360
