Journal
NATURE CLIMATE CHANGE
Volume 7, Issue 7, Pages 496-+Publisher
NATURE PORTFOLIO
DOI: 10.1038/NCLIMATE3310
Keywords
-
Funding
- US Department of Energy, Office of Science, Office of Biological and Environmental Research
- Accelerated Climate Modeling for Energy (ACME) project
- US Department of Energy Office of Science User Facility [DE-AC05-00OR22725]
- Office of Science of the US Department of Energy [DE-AC02-05CH11231]
- National Science Foundation
- Office of Science of the US Department of Energy
- US Department of Energy [DE-AC02-05CH11231]
- Laboratory Directed Research and Development Program of Oak Ridge National Laboratory, US Department of Energy
Ask authors/readers for more resources
Fossil fuel combustion and land-use change are the two largest contributors to industrial-era increases in atmospheric `CO2 concentration(1). Projections of these are thus fundamental inputs for coupled Earth system models (ESMs) used to estimate the physical and biological consequences of future climate system forcing(2,3). While historical data sets are available to inform past and current climate analyses(4,5), assessments of future climate change have relied on projections of energy and land use from energy-economic models, constrained by assumptions about future policy, land-use patterns and socio-economic development trajectories(6). Here we show that the climatic impacts on land ecosystems drive significant feedbacks in energy, agriculture, land use and carbon cycle projections for the twenty-first century. We find that exposure of human-appropriated land ecosystem productivity to biospheric change results in reductions of land area used for crops; increases in managed forest area and carbon stocks; decreases in global crop prices; and reduction in fossil fuel emissions for a low-mid-range forcing scenario(7). The feedbacks between climate-induced biospheric change and human system forcings to the climate system-demonstrated here-are handled inconsistently, or excluded altogether, in the one-way asynchronous coupling of energy-economic models to ESMs used to date(1,8,9).
Authors
I am an author on this paper
Click your name to claim this paper and add it to your profile.
Reviews
Recommended
No Data Available