Predominant regional biophysical cooling from recent land cover changes in Europe

Around 70 Mha of land cover changes (LCCs) occurred in Europe from 1992 to 2015. Despite LCCs being an important driver of regional climate variations, their temperature effects at a continental scale have not yet been assessed. Here, we integrate maps of historical LCCs with a regional climate mode...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Nature communications 2020-02, Vol.11 (1), p.1066-13, Article 1066
Main Authors: Huang, Bo, Hu, Xiangping, Fuglstad, Geir-Arne, Zhou, Xu, Zhao, Wenwu, Cherubini, Francesco
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
704/106
704/106/694
704/172
Abandonment
Agricultural land
Air temperature
Climate change
Climate change mitigation
Climate effects
Climate models
Cooling
Cooling effects
Environmental assessment
Humanities and Social Sciences
Land cover
Land use
multidisciplinary
Science
Science (multidisciplinary)
Temperature effects
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Summary:Around 70 Mha of land cover changes (LCCs) occurred in Europe from 1992 to 2015. Despite LCCs being an important driver of regional climate variations, their temperature effects at a continental scale have not yet been assessed. Here, we integrate maps of historical LCCs with a regional climate model to investigate air temperature and humidity effects. We find an average temperature change of −0.12 ± 0.20 °C, with widespread cooling (up to −1.0 °C) in western and central Europe in summer and spring. At continental scale, the mean cooling is mainly correlated with agriculture abandonment (cropland-to-forest transitions), but a new approach based on ridge-regression decomposing the temperature change to the individual land transitions shows opposite responses to cropland losses and gains between western and eastern Europe. Effects of historical LCCs on European climate are non-negligible and region-specific, and ignoring land-climate biophysical interactions may lead to sub-optimal climate change mitigation and adaptation strategies. Land cover change contributes to regional climate trends. Here, the authors use high-resolution land cover maps and state-of-the-art climate modelling to assess land cover change effects across Europe over 1992-2015, showing widespread cooling after agricultural abandonment but also different, region-specific effects.
ISSN:2041-1723
2041-1723
DOI:10.1038/s41467-020-14890-0