Vegetation-based climate mitigation in a warmer and greener World

Ramdane Alkama (), Giovanni Forzieri, Gregory Duveiller, Giacomo Grassi, Shunlin Liang and Alessandro Cescatti
Additional contact information
Ramdane Alkama: European Commission, Joint Research Centre
Giovanni Forzieri: European Commission, Joint Research Centre
Gregory Duveiller: European Commission, Joint Research Centre
Giacomo Grassi: European Commission, Joint Research Centre
Shunlin Liang: University of Maryland
Alessandro Cescatti: European Commission, Joint Research Centre

Nature Communications, 2022, vol. 13, issue 1, 1-10

Abstract: Abstract The mitigation potential of vegetation-driven biophysical effects is strongly influenced by the background climate and will therefore be influenced by global warming. Based on an ensemble of remote sensing datasets, here we first estimate the temperature sensitivities to changes in leaf area over the period 2003–2014 as a function of key environmental drivers. These sensitivities are then used to predict temperature changes induced by future leaf area dynamics under four scenarios. Results show that by 2100, under high-emission scenario, greening will likely mitigate land warming by 0.71 ± 0.40 °C, and 83% of such effect (0.59 ± 0.41 °C) is driven by the increase in plant carbon sequestration, while the remaining cooling (0.12 ± 0.05 °C) is due to biophysical land-atmosphere interactions. In addition, our results show a large potential of vegetation to reduce future land warming in the very-stringent scenario (35 ± 20% of the overall warming signal), whereas this effect is limited to 11 ± 6% under the high-emission scenario.

Date: 2022
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (10)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-022-28305-9 Abstract (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nat:natcom:v:13:y:2022:i:1:d:10.1038_s41467-022-28305-9

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://www.nature.com/ncomms/

DOI: 10.1038/s41467-022-28305-9

Access Statistics for this article

Nature Communications is currently edited by Nathalie Le Bot, Enda Bergin and Fiona Gillespie

More articles in Nature Communications from Nature
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().