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The international study, reported in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences today, found that intact rainforests across tropical Africa continued to remove carbon from the atmosphere before and during the 2015-2016 El Niño, despite the extreme heat and drought.
Tracking trees in 100 different tropical rainforests across six African countries, the researchers found that intact forests across the continent still removed 1.1 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide per year from the atmosphere during the El Niño monitoring period. This rate is equivalent to three times the carbon dioxide emissions of the UK in 2019.
During 2015-2016 African rainforests experienced warming of 0.92 degrees Celsius above the 1980-2010 average, and the strongest drought on record, both driven by the El Niño conditions on top of ongoing climate change. This event gave the scientists a unique opportunity to investigate how Africa's vast tropical rainforests could react to heat and drought.
Lead author Dr Amy Bennett, in Leeds' School of Geography, said: "We saw no sharp slowdown of tree growth, nor a big rise in tree deaths, as a result of the extreme climatic conditions. Overall, the uptake of carbon dioxide by these intact rainforests reduced by 36%, but they continued to function as a carbon sink, slowing the rate of climate change."
Tree measurements in long-term inventory plots in intact forest -- unaffected by logging or fire -- were completed just before the 2015-2016 El Niño struck. Emergency re-measurements of 46,000 trees across 100 of the plots in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Gabon, Cameroon, Ghana, Liberia and the Republic of the Congo then allowed the researchers the first ever opportunity to directly investigate how African tropical forests would react to the hotter, drier conditions.
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