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Ecological zoning for climate policy and global change studies

Nature Sustainability (2024)Cite this article

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Abstract

As climate change accelerates, nations are moving towards meeting their nationally determined contributions and reducing greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. Reporting of this from the agriculture, forestry and other land use sector relies on data related to land use and management, climate and soil type. Where such data are unavailable, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) provides a set of default factors, based on an extensive literature review of likely GHG emission factors and carbon stock changes disaggregated by the Food and Agriculture Organization’s global ecological zones. As understanding of global ecological zones under environmental change improves, it becomes necessary to reassess such ecological zoning approaches to enable reporting of GHG emissions to support nationally determined contributions and global change studies. Here we propose a globally consistent ecological zoning approach based on Holdridge life zones using climatic data from the Climate Research Unit on a 0.5° grid, which tackles certain limitations found in the existing guidance provided by the IPCC. A set of three global ecological zone maps based on Holdridge life zones were devised using increasing levels of aggregation, which could support sustainability studies of global environmental change, specifically climate change, and be used as a zoning approach by the IPCC.

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Fig. 1: Comparison of the IPCC climate region map and the FAO GEZ map for Cambodia.
Fig. 2: Level III HLZ map (disaggregated).
Fig. 3: Level II HLZ map, with aggregation of altitudinal belts to equivalent latitudinal classes.
Fig. 4: HLZ map (level I) ecological zones of the world.
Fig. 5: Illustration of how the appropriate life zone is assigned using the circumcentre (mid-point) of the base of the equilateral triangle(biotemperature, precipitation and petRatio).
Fig. 6: Method to further aggregate the life zones to ecological zones of the world.

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Data availability

All data used in this article is publicly available and correctly referenced by the authors. The authors mainly used climate data from CRU and elevation data from USGS EROS. The codes and assets are made available via the links below on Google Earth Engine. Climate data from CRU can be accessed via https://crudata.uea.ac.uk/cru/data/hrg/. Elevation data from USGS EROS can be accessed via https://www.usgs.gov/centers/eros/science/usgs-eros-archive-digital-elevation-global-30-arc-second-elevation-gtopo30.

Code availability

The entire code can be accessed on Google Earth Engine via https://code.earthengine.google.com/?accept_repo=users/philipaudebert/HLZs. The assets can also directly be accessed via https://code.earthengine.google.com/?asset=users/philipaudebert/HLZ/Level1, https://code.earthengine.google.com/?asset=users/philipaudebert/HLZ/Level2 and https://code.earthengine.google.com/?asset=users/philipaudebert/HLZ/Level3. The code can also be accessed on Github via https://github.com/phil-aud/ecological-zoning.

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Acknowledgements

The authors thank all experts from the FAO, notably the Forestry Division, Land and Water Division and the Office of Climate Change, Biodiversity and the Environment, and the IPCC for their participation in the technical consultations to validate the methodology of the proposed ecological zoning approach. No specific funding was awarded for writing up this paper. However, this paper was produced with the support of FAO and the French Development Agency (AFD).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Office of Climate Change, Biodiversity and Environment, Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, Viale delle Terme di Caracalla, Rome, Italy

    Philip Audebert, Eleanor Milne, Laure-Sophie Schiettecatte, Daniel Dionisio, Maidie Sinitambirivoutin, Carolina Pais, Clara Proença & Martial Bernoux

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  1. Philip Audebert
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Contributions

P.A. and E.M. were responsible for formulating the overarching research goals and aims, designing and validating the methodology and writing the paper. P.A. was responsible for implementing the computer code and supporting algorithms, ensuring the reproducibility of results, conducting the formal analysis and synthesis of study data. L.-S.S. was responsible for validating the methodological approach and writing the paper. D.D. and M.S. were responsible for testing of existing code components and for the provision of study materials. C. Proença and C. Pais were responsible for the visualization of the published work. M.B. was responsible for the supervision of the research activity.

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Philip Audebert.

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The authors declare no competing interests.

Peer review

Peer review information

Nature Sustainability thanks Eileen H. Helmer and the other, anonymous, reviewer(s) for their contribution to the peer review of this work.

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Extended data

Extended Data Fig. 1 Equivalence of altitudinal belts and latitudinal regions.

Figure showing how different altitudinal belts were systematically assigned to a life zone using a life zone found in the latitudinal equivalent. Adapted from Holdridge.

Extended Data Fig. 2 Correspondence of IPCC Climate Zones and HLZs.

The stacked column chart shows the relationship between the IPCC Climate Zones and the Holdridge Life Zones where each colour represents the occurrence of a HLZ within each of the IPCC Climate Zones. The twelve IPCC Climate Zones are represented on the x-axis, whereas the y-axis represents the pixel distribution of each of the HLZ.

Supplementary information

Supplementary Information

Supplementary Tables 1 and 2. Supplementary Table 1. Equivalence table between the IPCC climate zones and ecological zones. Supplementary Table 2. Summary table of existing ecological zone maps.

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Audebert, P., Milne, E., Schiettecatte, LS. et al. Ecological zoning for climate policy and global change studies. Nat Sustain (2024). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41893-024-01416-5

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