Amazonian environments are being degraded by modern industrial and agricultural activities at a pace far above anything previously known, imperiling its vast biodiversity reserves and globally important ecosystem services. The most substantial threats come from regional deforestation, because of export market demands, and global climate change. The Amazon is currently perched to transition rapidly from a largely forested to a nonforested landscape. These changes are happening much too rapidly for Amazonian species, peoples, and ecosystems to respond adaptively. Policies to prevent the worst outcomes are known and must be enacted immediately. We now need political will and leadership to act on this information. To fail the Amazon is to fail the biosphere, and we fail to act at our peril.

Tropical forests are recognized for their role in providing diverse ecosystem services (ESs), with carbon uptake the best recognized. The capacity of tropical forests to provide ESs is strongly linked to their enormous biodiversity. However, causal relationships between biodiversity and ESs are poorly understood. This may be because biodiversity is often translated into species richness. Here, we argue that focusing on multiple attributes of biodiversity—structure, composition, and function—will make relationships between biodiversity and ESs clearer. In this review, we discuss the ecological processes behind ESs from tropical humid and subhumid forests of South America. Our main goal is to understand the links between the ESs and those three biodiversity attributes. While supporting and regulating services relate more closely to forest structure and function, provisioning services relate more closely to forest composition and function, and cultural services are more related to structure and composition attributes. In this sense, ESs from subhumid forests (savannas) differ from those provided by the Amazon Forest, although both ecosystems are recognized as harboring tremendous biodiversity. Given this, if anthropogenic drivers of change promote a shift in the Amazon Forest toward savanna—the savannization hypothesis—the types of services provided will change, especially climate regulating services. This review emphasizes the importance of deeply understanding ecosystem structure, composition, and function to better understand the services ecosystems provide. Understanding that anthropogenic impacts on biodiversity occur through these three main attributes, it becomes easier to anticipate how humans will impact ESs.

RESUMO A floresta amazônica passou por mudanças climáticas significativas nos últimos 50 anos. Para combater as causas das mudanças climáticas, promover o desenvolvimento sustentável e apoiar Povos Indígenas e comunidades locais na região, o Painel Científico para a Amazônia introduziu o conceito de uma sociobioeconomia de saudáveis florestas em pé e rios fluindo. No entanto, a Amazônia está em perigo de ultrapassar um ponto de não retorno, o limiar que sustenta a estabilidade ambiental da floresta, o que deve dificultar a implementação da sociobioeconomia e agravar os problemas sociais e ambientais na região. Neste estudo, analisamos os impactos do aquecimento global, mudanças de usos da terra, secas extremas e incêndios florestais na provisão de serviços ecossistêmicos e discutimos soluções baseadas na natureza para fortalecer a sociobioeconomia da região amazônica.