Over centuries, the Amazon\u2019s hundreds of Indigenous societies have built up an abundance of knowledge about the rainforest\u2019s thousands of plant species and how to use them.<\/p>\n
This vast library of botanical know-how is under growing threat from climate change, according to a new study<\/a> in the journal Nature.<\/p>\n In the coming decades, global warming could kill off roughly 30 percent of the Amazon\u2019s useful plant species within the communities that use them, the study found. These areas could suffer such extensive losses even if nations manage to restrain worldwide warming to moderate levels, the study found, showing how vulnerable the region\u2019s flora are to higher temperatures and sharper swings between deluge and drought.<\/p>\n The species at risk include yoco, a woody vine that the Secoya people of the northwest Amazon make into a strong, finger-tingling morning brew. Ibapichuna, a deep-violet fruit that is cooked by the Cubeo people of Colombia to prepare an after-dinner drink. And wingimonkawe, a tree whose bark is processed by the Waorani people of Ecuador to treat infected wounds.<\/p>\n \u201cThis pool of species and cultural richness is part of who we are as humanity,\u201d said Jordi Bascompte, a professor of ecology at the University of Zurich who worked on the study. It is also a deep well of scientific possibility that has barely been tapped, he added. Within the Amazon\u2019s cornucopia may lie the next wonder compound, the next medical breakthrough akin to quinine, the malaria treatment that was first isolated from the bark of a rainforest tree.<\/p>\n Climate change driven by industrialized nations is already having major effects on the Amazon, with consequences that spill well beyond the forests\u2019 borders.<\/p>\n Wildfires have devastated huge areas<\/a> in recent years. Droughts are becoming more intense. Scientists are working to understand<\/a> whether the Amazon could soon cross a tipping point<\/a> that causes swaths of forest to transform into grasslands once too many trees have died off or been razed to make room for pastures and crops. Because these trees release so much moisture into the atmosphere, such a vast degradation could disrupt weather patterns far and wide.<\/p>\n Within the Amazon, the damage cuts to the heart of how the region\u2019s Indigenous peoples live.<\/p>\n \u201cClimate change has clearly been noticed on a large scale,\u201d said Yadira Kasent, the deputy mayor of the canton of Morona in Ecuador. For Ms. Kasent\u2019s people, the Shuar, native plants are central to daily life: the fruits and tubers they eat, the barks and succulents with which they treat stomach conditions and other ailments, the leaves they use as cosmetics.<\/p>\n \u201cWe\u2019ve learned to live alongside them, and their use has been passed down over time for countless needs,\u201d Ms. Kasent said.<\/p>\n To understand how this knowledge might be imperiled in a warmer future, the new study\u2019s lead author, Rodrigo C\u00e1mara Leret, first set out to catalog it all: Which plant species have been used by which Amazonian societies, and how?<\/p>\n Dr. C\u00e1mara Leret, an assistant professor in the Department of Systematic and Evolutionary Botany at the University of Zurich, hit the archives. He scoured books, scholarly papers and field reports. He combed 1950s monographs<\/a> on fish poisons, studies from the \u201960s and \u201970s<\/a> on the hallucinogenic brew known as ayahuasca, and modern inventories<\/a> of plants used by midwives and traditional healers.<\/p>\n He read the chronicles of some of the earliest Europeans to travel the Amazon: missionaries, explorers, naturalists commissioned by colonial powers. He trudged through archaic language and untangled species names from the time before biological classifications were standardized.<\/p>\n