In this episode we discuss the importance of the Amazon and implications of deforestation and fires for global climate.
- Importance of the Amazon for Latin America and the world
- Agribusiness and deforestation in the Amazon
- The Amazon and climate change feedback loop
Our guest Dr Luciana Vanni Gatti is an atmospheric chemist with a focus on greenhouse gases, trace gas analysis, atmospheric interactions, and volatile organic compounds. Her research is focused on understanding the role of Amazonia in the greenhouse gases balance and the effect of climate variables on those balances. From 1998 until 2015 she was a researcher at the Brazilian Nuclear and Energy Research Institute. Since 2015, she coordinates the Greenhouse Gas Laboratory (LaGEE) at the National Institute for Space Research in Brazil (INPE). She also coordinates international collaborative projects with NOAA, University of Colorado, University of Leeds, among others. In 2014, she led the most comprehensive carbon balance calculation study ever carried out in Brazil. She and her co-authors published this work in a paper titled ‘Drought sensitivity of Amazonian carbon balance’, which made the cover of the prestigious scientific magazine Nature and got wide media coverage.
Our interviewer for this episode is Dr Milena Ponczek. She is an atmospheric scientist working on the interaction of volatile organic compounds with atmospheric aerosols and air quality. She holds a degree in chemical engineering from the State University of Campinas (Brazil) where her research work was focused on the degradation of volatile organic compounds by photocatalysis. She got her PhD in Chemistry at the University of Lyon (France). She is currently a postdoctoral researcher at the Laboratory of Atmospheric Physics at the University of São Paulo working to better understand and characterize aerosol life cycle in the Amazon region. Find her on Twitter.
Episode notes and references:
- Deforested parts of Amazon ’emitting more CO2 than they absorb’
- Drought sensitivity of Amazonian carbon balance revealed by atmospheric measurements
- Amazon tragedy repeats itself as Brazil rainforest goes up in smoke
Music by Ritesh Prasanna.
Podcast website: https://atmospherictales.com