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| Titel |
Implications of land use change in tropical northern Africa under global warming |
| VerfasserIn |
T. Brücher, M. Claussen, T. Raddatz |
| Medientyp |
Artikel
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| Sprache |
Englisch
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| ISSN |
2190-4979
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| Digitales Dokument |
URL |
| Erschienen |
In: Earth System Dynamics ; 6, no. 2 ; Nr. 6, no. 2 (2015-12-10), S.769-780 |
| Datensatznummer |
250115489
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| Publikation (Nr.) |
 copernicus.org/esd-6-769-2015.pdf |
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| Zusammenfassung |
| A major link between climate and humans in tropical northern Africa, and the
Sahel in particular, is land use and associated land cover change, mainly
where subsistence farming prevails. Here we assess possible feedbacks between
the type of land use and harvest intensity and climate by analysing a series
of idealized GCM experiments using the Max Planck Institute Earth System
Model (MPI-ESM). The baseline for these experiments is a simulation forced by
the RCP8.5 (radiation concentration pathway) scenario, which includes strong
greenhouse gas emissions and anthropogenic land cover changes. The
anthropogenic land cover changes in the RCP8.5 scenario include a mixture of
pasture and agriculture. In subsequent simulations, we replace the entire
area affected by anthropogenic land cover change in the region between the
Sahara in the north and the Guinean Coast in the south (4 to 20\degree N)
with either pasture or agriculture. In a second set-up we vary the amount of
harvest in the case of agriculture. The RCP8.5 baseline simulation reveals
strong changes in the area mean agriculture and monsoon rainfall. In
comparison with these changes, any variation of the type of land use in the
study area leads to very small, mostly insignificantly small, additional
differences in mean temperature and annual precipitation change in this
region. These findings are only based on the specific set-up of our
experiments, which only focuses on variations in the kind of land use, and
not the increase in land use, over the 21st century, nor whether land use is
considered at all. Within the uncertainty of the representation of land use
in current ESMs, our study suggests marginal feedback between land use
changes and climate changes triggered by strong greenhouse gas emissions.
Hence as a good approximation, climate can be considered as an external
forcing: models investigating land-use–conflict dynamics can run offline by
prescribing seasonal or mean values of climate as a boundary condition for
climate. |
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