Biogeophysical Impacts of Land-Use Change on Climate Extremes in Low-Emission Scenarios: Results From HAPPI-Land
[1];
[1];
[1];
[1];
[2];
[2];
[1];
[4];
[5];
[6];
[7];
[3];
[8];
- Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule (ETH) Zurich, Zurich (Switzerland)
- Max Planck Inst. for Meteorology, Hamburg (Germany)
- PBL Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency, Den Haag (The Netherlands)
- The Univ. of Tokyo, Tokyo (Japan)
- Univ. of Bristol, Bristol (United Kingdom)
- National Inst. for Environmental Studies, Tsukuba (Japan)
- Univ. of Oxford, Oxford (United Kingdom)
- PBL Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency, Den Haag (The Netherlands); Utrecht Univ., Utrecht (The Netherlands)
- Met Office Hadley Centre, Exeter (United Kingdom); Univ. of Reading, Reading (United Kingdom)
The impacts of land use have been shown to have considerable influence on regional climate. With the recent international commitment to limit global warming to well below 2°C, emission reductions need to be ambitious and could involve major land-use change (LUC). Land-based mitigation efforts to curb emissions growth include increasing terrestrial carbon sequestration through reforestation, or the adoption of bioenergy crops. These activities influence local climate through biogeophysical feedbacks, however, it is uncertain how important they are for a 1.5° climate target. This was the motivation for HAPPI-Land: the half a degree additional warming, prognosis, and projected impacts -- and-use scenario experiment. Using four Earth system models, we present the first multimodel results from HAPPI-Land and demonstrate the critical role of land use for understanding the characteristics of regional climate extremes in low-emission scenarios. In particular, our results show that changes in temperature extremes due to LUC are comparable in magnitude to changes arising from half a degree of global warming. We also demonstrate that LUC contributes to more than 20% of the change in temperature extremes for large land areas concentrated over the Northern Hemisphere. However, we also identify sources of uncertainty that influence the multimodel consensus of our results including how LUC is implemented and the corresponding biogeophysical feedbacks that perturb climate. Therefore, our results highlight the urgent need to resolve the challenges in implementing LUC across models to quantify the impacts and consider how LUC contributes to regional changes in extremes associated with sustainable development pathways.
- Research Organization:
- Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL), Berkeley, CA (United States). National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC)
- Sponsoring Organization:
- USDOE Office of Science (SC)
- Grant/Contract Number:
- AC02-05CH11231
- OSTI ID:
- 1544313
- Journal Information:
- Earth's Future, Journal Name: Earth's Future Journal Issue: 3 Vol. 6; ISSN 2328-4277
- Publisher:
- American Geophysical Union (AGU)Copyright Statement
- Country of Publication:
- United States
- Language:
- English
Similar Records
Climate extremes, land–climate feedbacks and land-use forcing at 1.5°C
Simulating the biogeochemical and biogeophysical impacts of transient land cover change and wood harvest in the Community Climate System Model (CCSM4) from 1850 to 2100