Tropical Rainforest Climate Change

The Paris Climate Agreement strongly recognized the crucial role of forests for climate change mitigation as global mitigation goals will require negative carbon emissions.

Tropical rainforest climate change. The good news is that science economics and politics are. By protecting rainforest habitat for endangered species Rainforest Trust prevents carbon emissions and safeguards the planets resilience to climate change. Flenley Department of Biological Sciences Geography Programme Florida Institute of Technology.

While all forests have climate-cooling superpowers tropical forests trap larger amounts of carbon dioxide and evaporate more water. 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. Nature Geosci 6 268273 2013.

We develop bioclimatic models of spatial distribution for the regionally endemic rainforest vertebrates and use these models to predict the effects of climate warming on species distributions. As they photosynthesise and grow tropical forests remove enormous amounts of carbon from the atmosphere reducing global warming. Current and Future Impacts to Tropical Rainforests.

Studies have shown that halting tropical deforestation and allowing for regrowth could mitigate up to 50 of net global carbon emissions through 2050. In doing so they produce that thick and beautifully dramatic cloud cover that reflects sunlight back to space. All forests make the world wetter by sending a huge amount of water vapour into the atmosphere via evapotranspiration.

Flenley and William D. 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. Yet with every passing year climate change cuts into tropical forests capacity to operate as a safe natural carbon capture and storage system.

Science economics and politics are now aligned to support a major international effort to protect tropical forests. Tropical Rainforest Responses to Climatic Change Second Edition Mark B. So any changes in the size of the global rainforest can have a big impact on the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.