scholarly journals Research priorities in land use and land-cover change for the Earth system and integrated assessment modelling

2010 ◽  
Vol 30 (13) ◽  
pp. 2118-2128 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kathy Hibbard ◽  
Anthony Janetos ◽  
Detlef P. van Vuuren ◽  
Julia Pongratz ◽  
Steven K. Rose ◽  
...  
Author(s):  
Steven Manson

Be it global environmental change or environment and development, landuse and land-cover change is central to the dynamics and consequences in question in the southern Yucatán peninsular region. Designing policies to address these impacts is hampered by the difficulty of projecting land use and land cover, not only because the dynamics are complex but also because consequences are strongly place-based. This chapter describes an integrated assessment modeling framework that builds on the research detailed in earlier chapters in order to project land-use and land-cover change in a geographically explicit way. Integrated assessment is a term that describes holistic treatments of complex problems to assess both science and policy endeavors in global environmental change (Rotmans and Dowlatabadi 1998). The most common form of integrated assessment is computer modeling that combines socioeconomic and biogeophysical factors to predict global climate. Advanced in part by the successes of these global-scale models, integrated assessment has expanded to structure knowledge and set research priorities for a large range of coupled human–environment problems. Increasing recognition is given to the need for integrated assessment models to address regionalscale problems that are masked by global-scale assessments (Walker 1994). Such models must address two issues to project successfully land-use and land-cover change at the regional scale. First, change occurs incrementally in spatially distinct patterns that have different implications for global change (Lambin 1994). Second, a model must account for the complexity of, and relationships among, socio-economic and environmental factors (B. L. Turner et al. 1995). The SYPR integrated assessment model, therefore, has a fine temporal and spatial grain and it places land-use and landcover change at the intersection of land-manager decision-making, the environment, and socio-economic institutions. What follows is a description of an ongoing integrated assessment modeling endeavor of the SYPR project (henceforth, SYPR IA model). The depth and breadth of the SYPR project poses a challenge to the integrated assessment modeling effort since some unifying framework must reconcile a broad array of issues, theories, and data. The global change research community offers a general conception of how environmental change results from infrastructure development, population pressure, market opportunities, resource institutions, and environmental or resource policies (Stern, Young, and Drukman 1992).


2014 ◽  
Vol 11 (22) ◽  
pp. 6435-6450 ◽  
Author(s):  
A. V. Di Vittorio ◽  
L. P. Chini ◽  
B. Bond-Lamberty ◽  
J. Mao ◽  
X. Shi ◽  
...  

Abstract. Climate projections depend on scenarios of fossil fuel emissions and land use change, and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) AR5 parallel process assumes consistent climate scenarios across integrated assessment and earth system models (IAMs and ESMs). The CMIP5 (Coupled Model Intercomparison Project Phase 5) project used a novel "land use harmonization" based on the Global Land use Model (GLM) to provide ESMs with consistent 1500–2100 land use trajectories generated by historical data and four IAMs. A direct coupling of the Global Change Assessment Model (GCAM), GLM, and the Community ESM (CESM) has allowed us to characterize and partially address a major gap in the CMIP5 land coupling design: the lack of a corresponding land cover harmonization. For RCP4.5, CESM global afforestation is only 22% of GCAM's 2005 to 2100 afforestation. Likewise, only 17% of GCAM's 2040 afforestation, and zero pasture loss, were transmitted to CESM within the directly coupled model. This is a problem because GCAM relied on afforestation to achieve RCP4.5 climate stabilization. GLM modifications and sharing forest area between GCAM and GLM within the directly coupled model did not increase CESM afforestation. Modifying the land use translator in addition to GLM, however, enabled CESM to include 66% of GCAM's afforestation in 2040, and 94% of GCAM's pasture loss as grassland and shrubland losses. This additional afforestation increases CESM vegetation carbon gain by 19 PgC and decreases atmospheric CO2 gain by 8 ppmv from 2005 to 2040, which demonstrates that CESM without additional afforestation simulates a different RCP4.5 scenario than prescribed by GCAM. Similar land cover inconsistencies exist in other CMIP5 model results, primarily because land cover information is not shared between models. Further work to harmonize land cover among models will be required to increase fidelity between IAM scenarios and ESM simulations and realize the full potential of scenario-based earth system simulations.


2014 ◽  
Vol 11 (5) ◽  
pp. 7151-7188 ◽  
Author(s):  
A. V. Di Vittorio ◽  
L. P. Chini ◽  
B. Bond-Lamberty ◽  
J. Mao ◽  
X. Shi ◽  
...  

Abstract. Climate projections depend on scenarios of fossil fuel emissions and land use change, and the IPCC AR5 parallel process assumes consistent climate scenarios across Integrated Assessment and Earth System Models (IAMs and ESMs). The CMIP5 project used a novel "land use harmonization" based on the Global Land use Model (GLM) to provide ESMs with consistent 1500–2100 land use trajectories generated by historical data and four IAM projections. A direct coupling of the Global Change Assessment Model (GCAM), GLM, and the Community ESM (CESM) has allowed us to characterize and partially address a major gap in the CMIP5 land coupling design: the lack of a corresponding land cover harmonization. The CMIP5 CESM global afforestation is only 22% of GCAM's 2005 to 2100 RCP4.5 afforestation. Likewise, only 17% of GCAM's 2040 RCP4.5 afforestation, and zero pasture loss, were transmitted to CESM within the directly coupled model. This is a problem because afforestation was relied upon to achieve RCP4.5 climate stabilization. GLM modifications within the directly coupled model did not increase CESM afforestation. Modifying the land use translator in addition to GLM, however, enabled CESM to simulate 66% of GCAM's afforestation in 2040, and 94% of GCAM's pasture loss as grassland and shrubland losses. This additional afforestation increases vegetation carbon gain by 19 PgC and decreases atmospheric CO2 gain by 8 ppmv from 2005 to 2040, implying different RCP4.5 climate scenarios between CMIP5 GCAM and CESM. Although the IAMs and ESMs were not expected to have exactly the same climate forcing, due in part to different terrestrial carbon cycles and atmospheric radiation algorithms, the ESMs were expected to project climates representative of the RCP scenarios. Similar land cover inconsistencies exist in other CMIP5 model results, primarily because land cover information is not shared between models. High RCP4.5 afforestation might also contribute to inconsistencies as some ESMs might impose bioclimatic limits to potential forest area and have different rates of forest growth than projected by RCP4.5. Further work to harmonize land cover among models will be required to address this problem.


2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Shaoqiang Ni ◽  
Hui Lu

<p>By changing matter and energy exchange, biogeochemical process and geophysical process, land use and land cover changes have crucial effects on the earth system modelling. Previous studies have focused on reconstructing the land use and land cover change to be a continuous changing process over time considering human and natural factors. The real land cover change processes have rarely been taken into consideration in the simulation of earth system. Using Gong global land cover mapping products (1985-2015) and the Lawrence land cover dataset (default) in CESM, this study have quantitatively compared the differences in plant function types (PFT) between two products. The results show the land cover changes in default dataset are slowly changing processes with little variation from year to year. In contrast, the Gong global mapping products express a noticeable drastic change tendency between adjacent years. Driving the model with different land cover datasets, our results indicates that globally land evapotranspiration (ET) is dramatically impacted by the land cover changes, especially in areas with distinct tree changes. Also the land cover change can cause a certain proportion variation in soil water (-50%-65%) and runoff (-60%-60%, even >90% in some special grid points) in a global scale. This study estimates the substantial effect land use and land cover changes can have on the land surface hydrological process in earth system modelling.</p>


2022 ◽  
Author(s):  
TC Chakraborty ◽  
Yun Qian

Abstract Although the influence of land use/land cover change on climate has become increasingly apparent, cities and other built-up areas are usually ignored when estimating large-scale historical climate change or for future projections since cities cover a small fraction of the terrestrial land surface1,2. As such, ground-based observations of urban near-surface meteorology are rare and most earth system models do not represent historical or future urban land cover3–7. Here, by combining global satellite observations of land surface temperature with historical estimates of built-up area, we demonstrate that the urban temperature signal on continental- to regional-scale warming has become non-negligible, especially for rapidly urbanizing regions in Asia. Consequently, expected urban expansion over the next century suggest further increased urban influence on surface climate under all future climate scenarios. Based on these results, we argue that, in line with other forms of land use/land cover change, urbanization should be explicitly included in future climate change assessments. This would require extensive model development to incorporate urban extent and biophysics in current-generation earth system models to quantify potential urban feedbacks on the climate system at multiple scales.


PLoS ONE ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 16 (4) ◽  
pp. e0246662 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kathleen D. Morrison ◽  
Emily Hammer ◽  
Oliver Boles ◽  
Marco Madella ◽  
Nicola Whitehouse ◽  
...  

In the 12,000 years preceding the Industrial Revolution, human activities led to significant changes in land cover, plant and animal distributions, surface hydrology, and biochemical cycles. Earth system models suggest that this anthropogenic land cover change influenced regional and global climate. However, the representation of past land use in earth system models is currently oversimplified. As a result, there are large uncertainties in the current understanding of the past and current state of the earth system. In order to improve representation of the variety and scale of impacts that past land use had on the earth system, a global effort is underway to aggregate and synthesize archaeological and historical evidence of land use systems. Here we present a simple, hierarchical classification of land use systems designed to be used with archaeological and historical data at a global scale and a schema of codes that identify land use practices common to a range of systems, both implemented in a geospatial database. The classification scheme and database resulted from an extensive process of consultation with researchers worldwide. Our scheme is designed to deliver consistent, empirically robust data for the improvement of land use models, while simultaneously allowing for a comparative, detailed mapping of land use relevant to the needs of historical scholars. To illustrate the benefits of the classification scheme and methods for mapping historical land use, we apply it to Mesopotamia and Arabia at 6 kya (c. 4000 BCE). The scheme will be used to describe land use by the Past Global Changes (PAGES) LandCover6k working group, an international project comprised of archaeologists, historians, geographers, paleoecologists, and modelers. Beyond this, the scheme has a wide utility for creating a common language between research and policy communities, linking archaeologists with climate modelers, biodiversity conservation workers and initiatives.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Atul Jain ◽  
Xiaoming Xu ◽  
Shijie Shu

<p>The aim of this study is to estimate the net carbon fluxes from agriculture-related land-use and land cover change (LULCC) activities, which are referred to as emissions from the land due to human activities. These include land use (LU, e.g., farmland for food and feed production, including management) and land cover changes (LCC, e.g., deforestation for and reforestation of agricultural land, and conversion of grasslands and pastureland to agriculture land or vice versa). Agriculture land-use practices could be a source of atmospheric CO2. However, the management of agricultural practices may reduce carbon emissions and increase soil carbon sequestration. Simultaneously, land-cover change activities clear existing ecosystems, their biomass and disturb the soil, generating carbon emissions. Previous earth system models usually have a simple or no representation of land agriculture practices, such as planting crops, fertilization, irrigation, harvesting grains for food and livestock-feed, recovering crop residue for feed and other usages, and grazing, livestock-feed, and manure cycle. This study uses a land surface model with spatially heterogeneous representations of such agricultural land use activities, in addition to land cover change, such as the change from forest to agricultural land. Our study shows the net agricultural land area increase of 0.11 million hectares/yr during 2007-2013, including 2.12 million hectares/yr of other land converted to agricultural land and 2.01 million hectares/yr of agricultural land converted to other lands. The results show that global net carbon flux due to agriculture-related LULCC is 2.26 Pg C/yr (net emission), consisting of 38% due to land-use activities and 62% due to land cover change. South America (22%), North America (19%), and South and Southeast Asia (13%) are the top contributing regions for net carbon flux induced by LULCC. South America has contributed the most flux from land cover change (18%), while North America has generated the most carbon flux due to land-use activities (12%) among all macro geopolitical regions.  By quantifying the carbon fluxes induced by different agriculture activities this study provides a complete estimate of the yearly carbon cycle in the agriculture system at the spatial scale, which may improve the representations of agriculture land use activities in Earth System Models.</p>


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