Tropical Rainforest Climate Change

Simulated resilience of tropical rainforests to CO 2-induced climate change.

Tropical rainforest climate change. Science economics and politics are now aligned to support a major international effort to protect tropical forests. But theres a tragic irony to clearing rainforests for agriculture. Habitat fragmentation caused by geological processes such as volcanism and climate change occurred in the past.

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. 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. The carbon emissions resulting from Indonesias rapid deforestation account for around six to eight percent of global emissions.

Yet with every passing year climate change cuts into tropical forests capacity to operate as a safe natural carbon capture and storage system. Tropical Rainforest Responses to Climatic Change Second Edition Mark B. Forests and the climate are inextricably linked.

Tropical rainforests are among the most threatened ecosystems globally due to large-scale fragmentation as a result of human activity. Observed changes to tropical rainforests include fluctuations in rainfall patterns causing slow drying out of the rainforest. Tropical forests are an undervalued asset in meeting the greatest global challenges of our time-averting climate change and promoting development.

Forests play a role in mitigating climate change by absorbing the carbon dioxide emitted into the atmosphere from human activities chiefly the burning of fossil fuels for energy and other. On top of that various sources state that it was because of a sudden change in weather from wet and cold to hot and dry that caused some of the largest trees in the rainforest to die off and release carbon exposing the ground layers of the forest which was normally shaded by the forests upper layer known as the canopy and this caused animals to move out from their natural habitats. The Paris Climate Agreement strongly recognized the crucial role of forests for climate change mitigation as global mitigation goals will require negative carbon emissions.

However forests are also themselves affected by this warming. Forest options for climate mitigation include avoided forest loss improved natural forest management afforestation defined by the UNFCCC as the direct human-induced. In some cases tropical rainforests are expected to have higher storm intensity and like temperate rainforests.