TUM-IAS Fellows´ Lunch by Prof. Marina Hirota: “Amazonian tipping points: feedbacks, changes and impacts”

TUM-IAS continued its Fellow Lunch series with a talk by Prof. Dr. Marina Hirota (Federal University of Santa Catarina / Relva Institute). 
Appointed as a TUM-IAS Hans Fischer Senior Fellow in 2025, she also received her Fellowship Certificate from TUM-IAS Director Prof. Michael Molls during the event.

The possibility that the Amazon forest system could soon reach a tipping point, inducing large-scale collapse, has raised global concern. For 65 million years, Amazonian forests remained relatively resilient to climatic variability. Now, the region is increasingly exposed to unprecedented stress from warming temperatures, extreme droughts, deforestation and fires, even in central and remote parts of the system. Long-existing feedback between the forest and environmental conditions is being replaced by novel feedbacks that modify ecosystem resilience, increasing the risk of local and systemic critical transitions. 

In her talk, Marina Hirota presented the main historical changes and impacts threatening Amazonian forests, and how such changes are affecting the multi-scale feedbacks that keep forests and the whole system stable.