Forests, Climate, and Public Policy: A 500-Year Interdisciplinary Odyssey

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Abstract

Forests regulate climate at local, regional, and global scales through exchanges of momentum, energy, moisture, and chemicals with the atmosphere. The notion that forests affect climate is not new. A vigorous debate about deforestation, land use, and climate change occurred during the colonial settlement of North America and continued through the 1800s, but the arguments of conservationists and foresters for forest–climate influences were dismissed by meteorologists. Modern climate science shows that forests warm climate annually by decreasing surface albedo, cool climate through surface roughness and evapotranspiration and by storing carbon, and have additional effects through atmospheric chemistry. Land use is a key aspect of climate policy, but we lack comprehensive policy recommendations. Like our predecessors, we are seeking a deeper understanding of Earth's climate, its ecosystems, and our uses of those ecosystems, and just as importantly we are still searching for the right interdisciplinary framework in which to find those answers.

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High-resolution global maps of 21st-century forest cover change.

M. Hansen, P. Potapov, R. Moore … (2013)

Quantification of global forest change has been lacking despite the recognized importance of forest ecosystem services. In this study, Earth observation satellite data were used to map global forest loss (2.3 million square kilometers) and gain (0.8 million square kilometers) from 2000 to 2012 at a spatial resolution of 30 meters. The tropics were the only climate domain to exhibit a trend, with forest loss increasing by 2101 square kilometers per year. Brazil's well-documented reduction in deforestation was offset by increasing forest loss in Indonesia, Malaysia, Paraguay, Bolivia, Zambia, Angola, and elsewhere. Intensive forestry practiced within subtropical forests resulted in the highest rates of forest change globally. Boreal forest loss due largely to fire and forestry was second to that in the tropics in absolute and proportional terms. These results depict a globally consistent and locally relevant record of forest change.

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Global consequences of land use.

Jonathan Foley, Ruth DeFries, Gregory Asner … (2005)

Land use has generally been considered a local environmental issue, but it is becoming a force of global importance. Worldwide changes to forests, farmlands, waterways, and air are being driven by the need to provide food, fiber, water, and shelter to more than six billion people. Global croplands, pastures, plantations, and urban areas have expanded in recent decades, accompanied by large increases in energy, water, and fertilizer consumption, along with considerable losses of biodiversity. Such changes in land use have enabled humans to appropriate an increasing share of the planet's resources, but they also potentially undermine the capacity of ecosystems to sustain food production, maintain freshwater and forest resources, regulate climate and air quality, and ameliorate infectious diseases. We face the challenge of managing trade-offs between immediate human needs and maintaining the capacity of the biosphere to provide goods and services in the long term.