Local sources of global climate forcing from different categories of land use activities

• Main Authors: D. S. Ward, N. M. Mahowald
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Copernicus Publications 2015-04-01
• Series: Earth System Dynamics
• Online Access: http://www.earth-syst-dynam.net/6/175/2015/esd-6-175-2015.pdf

Identifying and quantifying the sources of climate impacts from land use and land cover change (LULCC) is necessary to optimize policies regarding LULCC for climate change mitigation. These climate impacts are typically defined relative to emissions of CO₂, or sometimes emissions of other long-lived greenhouse gases. Here we use previously published estimates of the radiative forcing (RF) of LULCC that include the short-lived forcing agents O₃ and aerosols, in addition to long-lived greenhouse gases and land albedo change, for six projections of LULCC as a metric for quantifying climate impacts. The LULCC RF is attributed to three categories of LULCC activities: direct modifications to land cover, agriculture, and wildfire response, and sources of the forcing are ascribed to individual grid points for each sector. Results for the year 2010 show substantial positive forcings from the direct modifications and agriculture sectors, particularly from south and southeast Asia, and a smaller magnitude negative forcing response from wildfires. The spatial distribution of future sources of LULCC RF is highly scenario-dependent, but we show that future forest area change can be used as a predictor of the future RF from direct modification activities, especially in the tropics, suggesting that deforestation-prevention policies that value land based on its C-content may be particularly effective at mitigating climate forcing originating in the tropics from this sector. However, the response of wildfire RF to tropical land cover changes is not as easily scalable and yet imposes a non-trivial feedback onto the total LULCC RF.