Back to Search Start Over

Climate impacts of U.S. forest loss span net warming to net cooling

Climate impacts of U.S. forest loss span net warming to net cooling

Authors :
Christopher B. Williams
Huan Gu
Tong Jiao
Source :
Science Advances
Publication Year :
2021
Publisher :
American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), 2021.

Abstract

Avoiding deforestation in the United States cools in some places but warms in others.<br />Storing carbon in forests is a leading land-based strategy to curb anthropogenic climate change, but its planetary cooling effect is opposed by warming from low albedo. Using detailed geospatial data from Earth-observing satellites and the national forest inventory, we quantify the net climate effect of losing forest across the conterminous United States. We find that forest loss in the intermountain and Rocky Mountain West causes net planetary cooling but losses east of the Mississippi River and in Pacific Coast states tend toward net warming. Actual U.S. forest conversions from 1986 to 2000 cause net cooling for a decade but then transition to a large net warming over a century. Avoiding these forest conversions could have yielded a 100-year average annual global cooling of 0.00088°C. This would offset 17% of the 100-year climate warming effect from a single year of U.S. fossil fuel emissions, underscoring the scale of the mitigation challenge.

Details

ISSN :
23752548
Volume :
7
Database :
OpenAIRE
Journal :
Science Advances
Accession number :
edsair.doi.dedup.....8d2851da8eace25a420932422bf3f0eb
Full Text :
https://doi.org/10.1126/sciadv.aax8859