Tropical Rainforest Climate Change

Despite their importance tropical forests and their ecosystems are being destroyed at a high and increasing rate in most forest-rich countries.

Tropical rainforest climate change. Worldwide the degradation and destruction of tropical rainforests is responsible for around 15 percent of all annual greenhouse. In some cases tropical rainforests are expected to have higher storm intensity and like temperate rainforests. Tropical forests are an undervalued asset in meeting the greatest global challenges of our time-averting climate change and promoting development.

Tropical rainforests store a lot of carbon as living biomass. 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. 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.

Forests play a role in mitigating climate change by absorbing the carbon dioxide emitted into the atmosphere from human activities chiefly the burning of fossil fuels for energy and other. As they photosynthesise and grow tropical forests remove enormous amounts of carbon from the atmosphere reducing global warming. Huntingford C Zelazowski P Galbraith D.

However forests are also themselves affected by this warming. Their underlying soils are extremely poor. In doing so they produce that thick and beautifully dramatic cloud cover that reflects sunlight back to space.

Forest options for climate mitigation include avoided forest loss improved natural forest management afforestation defined by the UNFCCC as the direct human-induced. However we demonstrate that the impacts of global climate change in the tropical rainforests of northeastern Australia have the potential to result in many extinctions. All forests make the world wetter by sending a huge amount of water vapour into the atmosphere via evapotranspiration.

Nature Geosci 6 268273 2013. Science economics and politics are now aligned to support a major international effort to protect tropical forests. Tropical forests will be resilient to global warming but only if nations act quickly to cut greenhouse gas emissions new research suggests.