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- ItemHysteresis of tropical forests in the 21st century([London] : Nature Publishing Group UK, 2020) Staal, Arie; Fetzer, Ingo; Wang-Erlandsson, Lan; Bosmans, Joyce H. C.; Dekker, Stefan C.; van Nes, Egbert H.; Rockström, Johan; Tuinenburg, Obbe A.Tropical forests modify the conditions they depend on through feedbacks at different spatial scales. These feedbacks shape the hysteresis (history-dependence) of tropical forests, thus controlling their resilience to deforestation and response to climate change. Here, we determine the emergent hysteresis from local-scale tipping points and regional-scale forest-rainfall feedbacks across the tropics under the recent climate and a severe climate-change scenario. By integrating remote sensing, a global hydrological model, and detailed atmospheric moisture tracking simulations, we find that forest-rainfall feedback expands the geographic range of possible forest distributions, especially in the Amazon. The Amazon forest could partially recover from complete deforestation, but may lose that resilience later this century. The Congo forest currently lacks resilience, but is predicted to gain it under climate change, whereas forests in Australasia are resilient under both current and future climates. Our results show how tropical forests shape their own distributions and create the climatic conditions that enable them.
- ItemFuture Hydroclimatic Impacts on Africa: Beyond the Paris Agreement(Hoboken, NJ : Wiley-Blackwell, 2019) Piemontese, Luigi; Fetzer, Ingo; Rockström, Johan; Jaramillo, FernandoProjections of global warming in Africa are generally associated with increasing aridity and decreasing water availability. However, most freshwater assessments focus on single hydroclimatic indicators (e.g., runoff, precipitation, or aridity), lacking analysis on combined changes in evaporative demand, and water availability on land. There remains a high degree of uncertainty over water implications at the basin scale, in particular for the most water-consuming sector—food production. Using the Budyko framework, we perform an assessment of future hydroclimatic change for the 50 largest African basins, finding a consistent pattern of change in four distinct regions across the two main emission scenarios corresponding to the Paris Agreement, and the business as usual. Although the Paris Agreement is likely to lead to less intense changes when compared to the business as usual, both scenarios show the same pattern of hydroclimatic shifts, suggesting a potential roadmap for hydroclimatic adaptation. We discuss the social-ecological implications of the projected hydroclimatic shifts in the four regions and argue that climate policies need to be complemented by soil and water conservation practices to make the best use of future water resources. ©2019. The Authors.