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Deforestation has pushed the Amazon to the very edge of a tipping point that would see it become a net source of CO2 and accelerate climate change, according to research using new technologies to map carbon emissions in the rainforest from 2013 to 2022.

Although it is historically a carbon sink, the Amazon biome released more carbon than it absorbed during 2015-16 and 2017-18, , a company that provides satellite imaging, and the non-profit organisation Amazon Conservation found.

鈥淭he Amazon is teetering between sink and source. But at some point, with continued degradation, it could flip entirely to a permanent carbon source,鈥� says at Amazon Conservation, who led the research.

The 6.7聽million聽square kilometres of trees, plants and soil in the Amazon take in carbon as the rainforest grows, cooling the planet, but that deforestation is reducing the rainforest鈥檚 capacity to regulate the global climate.

The south-eastern Amazon, which has seen the most deforestation, has already become a steady net emitter of carbon as its ecosystem has been transformed.

Finer and his colleagues used machine learning, satellite imagery, airborne lasers and global biomass data from NASA to map the changes in the entire rainforest canopy at a resolution of 30 metres, an unprecedented level of detail. They then used the biomass data to compare the carbon lost from fires and forest clearing against the carbon stored from forest growth.

A previous report by Amazon Conservation found that the Amazon absorbed 64.7 million tonnes of carbon between 2013 and 2022 鈥� a gain of just 0.1 per cent of the 56.8 billion tonnes of carbon stored in the rainforest. Brazil, Colombia, Suriname, Guyana and French Guiana took in the largest amount of carbon, while Bolivia, Venezuela, Peru and Ecuador released the largest amount.

The new breakdown of that data into two-year periods shows how the forest swung from carbon sink to source during periods that coincided with severe seasons of drought in 2015 and 2016 and fires in 2016 and 2017.

Above-ground carbon storage rebounded from 2019 to 2022. The study does not include more recent data, but fires and droughts in 2023 and 2024 suggest the Amazon has returned to being a carbon source, Finer says.

鈥淚n the 1990s, the Amazon forest was removing close to 1.5 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide a year [before accounting for CO2 released]鈥�, but as this study shows, when you add together emissions from deforestation, degradation and fires, the forest鈥檚 ability to remove carbon is now very small,鈥� says at the University of S茫o Paulo, Brazil.

Trees that have not been cleared for farming or land grabs are degraded by damage to their environment, meaning they take in less carbon and are more susceptible to fires, which further accelerate climate change, Nobre adds.

The findings add to the evidence from studies with different methodologies that have also found that the rainforest鈥檚 ability to offset humanity鈥檚 pollution is waning.

in 2021 found that the Brazilian聽Amazon released聽more carbon into the atmosphere in the previous decade than it absorbed and readings in the atmosphere from 2010 to 2018 found that fires were releasing far more carbon than was taken up through forest growth.

Although the Amazon鈥檚 shrinking capacity to take in carbon is concerning, it is important to note that the area studied in the report is the entire Amazon biome, which includes Manaus, a city of 2 million people, says at the University of Oxford.

鈥淧eople usually assume that when we are talking about 鈥榯he Amazon鈥� that we are only talking about the forest, but these studies often look at the whole biome. If we were to isolate just the forest, it is a sink. A sink that is taking in less carbon, but still a sink,鈥� she says.