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Climate science

Afforestation cools more or less

Nature Geoscience volume 4, pages 504–505 (2011)Cite this article

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Forests affect climate not only by taking up carbon, but also by absorbing solar radiation and enhancing evaporation. In the tropics, the climate benefit of afforestation may be nearly double that expected from carbon budgets alone.

Afforestation, reforestation and avoidance of deforestation are recognized as methods for reducing anthropogenic global warming by the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. More recently, the concept of Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation (REDD) has started to provide a framework within which landowners can be compensated for leaving their forests untouched. For policy purposes, the climatic value of forests is measured solely in terms of carbon uptake and storage1. But conversion of croplands to forests also affects climate through the modification of land surface properties, such as reflectivity and evaporation2. Writing in Nature Geoscience, Arora and Montenegro3 suggest that consideration of carbon budgets alone may lead to an overestimation of the climatic benefits of afforestation in boreal and temperate regions, but an underestimation in tropical regions.

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Figure 1: Afforestation effects on global mean temperature.

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  1. Richard A. Betts is at the Met Office Hadley Centre, FitzRoy Road, Exeter EX1 3PB, UK,

    Richard A. Betts

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  1. Richard A. Betts
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Correspondence to Richard A. Betts.

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Betts, R. Afforestation cools more or less. Nature Geosci 4, 504–505 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1038/ngeo1223

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