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Evidence of localised Amazon rainforest dieback in CMIP6 models

Despite little evidence of regional Amazon rainforest dieback, many localised abrupt dieback events are observed in the latest state-of-the-art global climate models under anthropogenic climate change. The detected dieback events would still cause severe consequences for local communities and ecosystems. This study suggests that 7±5 % of the northern South America region would experience abrupt downward shifts in vegetation carbon for every degree of global warming past 1.5 °C.

Glacial runoff buffers droughts through the 21st century

Global climate models suggest that droughts could worsen over the coming century. In mountain basins with glaciers, glacial runoff can ease droughts, but glaciers are retreating worldwide. We analysed how one measure of drought conditions changes when accounting for glacial runoff that changes over time. Surprisingly, we found that glacial runoff can continue to buffer drought throughout the 21st century in most cases, even as the total amount of runoff declines.

Downscaling of climate change scenarios for a high-resolution, site-specific assessment of drought stress risk for two viticultural regions with heterogeneous landscapes

We modelled water budget developments of viticultural growing regions on the spatial scale of individual vineyard plots with respect to landscape features like the available water capacity of the soils, slope, and aspect of the sites. We used an ensemble of climate simulations and focused on the occurrence of drought stress. The results show a high bandwidth of projected changes where the risk of potential drought stress becomes more apparent in steep-slope regions.

Multi-century dynamics of the climate and carbon cycle under both high and net negative emissions scenarios

We explore the long-term dynamics of Earth’s climate and carbon cycles under a pair of contrasting scenarios to the year 2300 using six models that include both climate and carbon cycle dynamics. One scenario assumes very high emissions, while the second assumes a peak in emissions, followed by rapid declines to net negative emissions. We show that the models generally agree that warming is roughly proportional to carbon emissions but that many other aspects of the model projections differ.

Coupling human and natural systems for sustainability: experience from China’s Loess Plateau

To understand the dynamics of a coupled human and natural system (CHANS) and promote its sustainability, we propose a conceptual “pattern-process-service-sustainability” cascade framework. The use of this framework is systematically illustrated by a review of CHANS research experience in China’s Loess Plateau in terms of coupling landscape patterns and ecological processes, linking ecological processes to ecosystem services, and promoting social-ecological sustainability.

Impact of bioenergy crop expansion on climate–carbon cycle feedbacks in overshoot scenarios

The deployment of bioenergy crops for capturing carbon from the atmosphere facilitates global warming mitigation via generating negative CO2 emissions. Here, we explored the consequences of large-scale energy crops deployment on the land carbon cycle. The land-use change for energy crops leads to carbon emissions and loss of future potential increase in carbon uptake by natural ecosystems. This impact should be taken into account by the modelling teams and accounted for in mitigation policies.

Spatiotemporal patterns and drivers of terrestrial dissolved organic carbon (DOC) leaching into the European river network

Dissolved organic carbon (DOC) leaching from soils into river networks is an important component of the land carbon © budget, but its spatiotemporal variation is not yet fully constrained. We use a land surface model to simulate the present-day land C budget at the European scale, including leaching of DOC from the soil. We found average leaching of 14.3 Tg C yr-1 (0.6% of terrestrial net primary production) with seasonal variations. We determine runoff and temperature to be the main drivers.

DOC) leaching into the European river network">Read more

Balanced estimate and uncertainty assessment of European climate change using the large EURO-CORDEX regional climate model ensemble

This research paper proposes an assessment of mean climate change responses and related uncertainties over Europe for mean seasonal temperature and total seasonal precipitation. An advanced statistical approach is applied to a large ensemble of 87 high-resolution EURO-CORDEX projections. For the first time, we provide a comprehensive estimation of the relative contribution of GCMs and RCMs, RCP scenarios, and internal variability to the total variance of a very large ensemble.

EURO-CORDEX regional climate model ensemble">Read more

Ubiquity of human-induced changes in climate variability

A large ensemble of simulations with 100 members has been conducted with the state-of-the-art CESM2 Earth system model, using historical and SSP3-7.0 forcing. Our main finding is that there are significant changes in the variance of the Earth system in response to anthropogenic forcing, with these changes spanning a broad range of variables important to impacts for human populations and ecosystems.

Vulnerability of European ecosystems to two compound dry and hot summers in 2018 and 2019

Temperate biomes in Europe are not prone to recurrent dry and hot conditions in summer. However, these conditions may become more frequent in the coming decades. Because stress conditions can leave legacies for many years, this may result in reduced ecosystem resilience under recurrent stress. We assess vegetation vulnerability to the hot and dry summers in 2018 and 2019 in Europe and find the important role of inter-annual legacy effects from 2018 in modulating the impacts of the 2019 event.

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