Tropical Rainforest Climate Change

Tropical forests will be resilient to global warming but only if nations act quickly to cut greenhouse gas emissions new research suggests.

Tropical rainforest climate change. The Paris Climate Agreement strongly recognized the crucial role of forests for climate change mitigation as global mitigation goals will require negative carbon emissions. In some cases tropical rainforests are expected to have higher storm intensity and like temperate rainforests. Gosling Editors Tropical Rainforest Responses to Climatic Change Second Edition Published in association with Praxis Publishing Chichester UK Professor Mark B.

The carbon emissions resulting from Indonesias rapid deforestation account for around six to eight percent of global emissions. Simulated resilience of tropical rainforests to CO 2-induced climate change. Despite their importance tropical forests and their ecosystems are being destroyed at a high and increasing rate in most forest-rich countries.

Flenley and William D. Habitat fragmentation caused by geological processes such as volcanism and climate change occurred in the past. Here we show that at current carbon market prices the protection of tropical forests can generate investible carbon amounting to 18 11 GtCO2e yr1 globally.

Yet with every passing year climate change cuts into tropical forests capacity to operate as a safe natural carbon capture and storage system. Rainforests are perhaps the most endangered habitat on Earth the canary in the climate-change coal mine said Sassan Saatchi a JPL scientist and lead author of the new study published July 23 in the journal OneEarth. However forests are also themselves affected by this warming.

Global responses to climate change and local tropical land-use At a global scale societal and economic responses to cli-mate change can magnify human pressures on tropical forestsSpurredby risingpetroleum prices andtheneedto mitigate greenhouse gas emissions crop-based biofuel production has increased rapidly in recent years 5455. All forests make the world wetter by sending a huge amount of water vapour into the atmosphere via evapotranspiration. Tropical rainforests are among the most threatened ecosystems globally due to large-scale fragmentation as a result of human activity.

Observed changes to tropical rainforests include fluctuations in rainfall patterns causing slow drying out of the rainforest. Forests and the climate are inextricably linked. Two new studies published in the journals Nature and Nature Geosciences suggest die-back is likely to be far less severe than scientists previously thought.