Tropical Rainforest Climate Change

Flenley Department of Biological Sciences Geography Programme Florida Institute of Technology.

Tropical rainforest climate change. While all forests have climate-cooling superpowers tropical forests trap larger amounts of carbon dioxide and evaporate more water. Science economics and politics are now aligned to support a major international effort to protect tropical forests. Tropical rainforests do it better.

In doing so they produce that thick and beautifully dramatic cloud cover that reflects sunlight back to space. 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. Tropical rainforests store a lot of carbon as living biomass.

As they photosynthesise and grow tropical forests remove enormous amounts of carbon from the atmosphere reducing global warming. On top of that various sources state that it was because of a sudden change in weather from wet and cold to hot and dry that caused some of the largest trees in the rainforest to die off and release carbon exposing the ground layers of the forest which was normally shaded by the forests upper layer known as the canopy and this caused animals to move out from their natural habitats. 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 in tropical and temperate regions have a cooling effect whereas boreal forests found in high northern latitudes make their climate warmer. Forest options for climate mitigation include avoided forest loss improved natural forest management afforestation defined by the UNFCCC as the direct human-induced. The carbon emissions resulting from Indonesias rapid deforestation account for around six to eight percent of global emissions.

Most Asian rainforests appear to be suffering more from changes in land use than from the changing climate. Their underlying soils are extremely poor. Yet with every passing year climate change cuts into tropical forests capacity to operate as a safe natural carbon capture and storage system.

So any changes in the size of the global rainforest can have a big impact on the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. 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. A team of researchers coordinated by the University of Leeds found that rainforests can continue to absorb huge volumes of carbon if global.