Protecting climate with forests
By R. B. Jackson, J. Randerson, J. Canadell, R. Anderson, R. Avissar, Dennis D. Baldocchi, Gordon Bonan, K. Caldeira, N. Diffenbaugh, Christopher B. Field and 5 more. 2008
407 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Policies for climate mitigation on land rarely acknowledge biophysical factors, such as reflectivity, evaporation, and surface roughness. Yet such factors can alter temperatures much more than carbon sequestration does, and often in a conflicting way. We outline a framework for examining biophysical factors in mitigation policies and provide some best-practice recommendations based on that framework. Tropical projects—avoided deforestation, forest restoration, and afforestation—provide the greatest climate value, because carbon storage and biophysics align to cool the Earth. In contrast, the climate benefits of carbon storage are often counteracted in boreal and other snow-covered regions, where darker trees trap more heat than snow does. Managers can increase the climate benefit of some forest projects by using more reflective and deciduous species and through urban forestry projects that reduce energy use. Ignoring biophysical interactions could result in millions of dollars being invested in some mitigation projects that provide little climate benefit or, worse, are counter-productive.
Subfields: Global and Planetary Change
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/239ac5eae30df7ab6314794a463ff3cc120f5447
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In Global and Planetary Change
Citations in the corpus
- Carbon debt and carbon sequestration parity in forest bioenergy production (2012, background): “However, C storage is not the only way that vegetation affects climate, as different levels of surface reflectance (albedo) and evapotranspiration result in different levels of heat absorbance in the terrestrial biosphere (Jackson et al., 2008; Anderson et al., 2011).”
- Negative emissions—Part 2: Costs, potentials and side effects (2018, background): “One of the most prominent issues from a climateperspective is albedochange,whichfinds significant attention particularly in global studies (Anderson et al 2011, Arora and Montenegro 2011, Betts et al 2007, Jackson et al 2008, Wang et al 2014).”
- Soil carbon sequestration and biochar as negative emission technologies (2016, background): “…weathering to remove CO2 from the atmosphere is accelerated, and the products stored in soils, or buried in land/deep ocean and (iv) afforestation and reforestation (AR) to fix atmospheric carbon in biomass and soils (Canadell & Raupach, 2008; Jackson et al., 2008; Arora & Montenegro, 2011).”
- Afforestation in China cools local land surface temperature (2014, background): “This clearly indicates that PF across China absorbs more incoming radiation and dissipates more energy as latent heat (8, 9, 11, 22).”
- Carbon footprints and embodied carbon at multiple scales (2010, background): “Carbon footprints have focused on long-lived greenhouse gases, but there is scope to include short-lived components [20 ] and biophysical factors [61] using a variety of metrics [20 ].”
- Hyperspectral remote sensing of plant biochemistry using Bayesian model averaging with variable and band selection (2013, background): “Biospheric functioning is mediated by both external abiotic forcings and internal vegetation physiology (Jackson et al., 2008), with the latter inherently linked to plant biochemistry.”
- Investigating afforestation and bioenergy CCS as climate change mitigation strategies (2014, background): “…in snow-covered areas of the northern hemisphere, reduction of albedo due to afforestation might jeopardize the mitigation effect of carbon removal from the atmosphere, which could result in a net warming effect (Schaeffer et al 2006, Bala et al 2007, Jackson et al 2008, Jones et al 2013).”