Anthropology Research Seminar: The imminence of crossing tipping points in the Amazon rainforest. The decisive decade

I report and analyze in this lecture two questions that increasingly mobilize the scientific community and that should occupy the center of the regional, continental and global political arena: (1) to what extent have the most degraded parts of the Amazon rainforest already passed a tipping point? (2) how close are the least degraded ones to crossing this threshold? In this gigantic tropical biome, a tipping point refers to its inability to continue sustaining itself, once a limit of destructive anthropic interference in a warming world has been exceeded.

Luiz Marques is Associate Professor (retired) in the Department of History at the State University of Campinas, Unicamp, Brazil. In 2018, he was a visiting professor at the University of Leiden, in the Netherlands. He published Capitalism and environmental collapse (Springer, 2020).  In 2023, he published "The Decisive Decade. (São Paulo, Editora Elefante).  He is currently senior professor at Ilum School of Science at the National Center for Research in Energy and Materials (CNPEM), Campinas, Brazil