Tropical deforestation causes large reductions in observed precipitation
| dc.contributor.author | Smith, C. | |
| dc.contributor.author | Baker, J. C. A. | |
| dc.contributor.author | Spracklen, D. V. | |
| dc.date.accessioned | 2023-04-27T04:04:45Z | |
| dc.date.available | 2023-04-27T04:04:45Z | |
| dc.date.issued | 2023-03-01 | |
| dc.description | © The Author(s) 2023. This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. The Version of Scholarly Record of this Article is published in Nature, 2023, available online at: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-022-05690-1 . Keywords: climate change; tropical ecology. | |
| dc.description.abstract | Tropical forests play a critical role in the hydrological cycle and can influence local and regional precipitation. Previous work has assessed the impacts of tropical deforestation on precipitation, but these efforts have been largely limited to case studies. A wider analysis of interactions between deforestation and precipitation—and especially how any such interactions might vary across spatial scales—is lacking. Here we show reduced precipitation over deforested regions across the tropics. Our results arise from a pan-tropical assessment of the impacts of 2003–2017 forest loss on precipitation using satellite, station-based and reanalysis datasets. The effect of deforestation on precipitation increased at larger scales, with satellite datasets showing that forest loss caused robust reductions in precipitation at scales greater than 50 km. The greatest declines in precipitation occurred at 200 km, the largest scale we explored, for which 1 percentage point of forest loss reduced precipitation by 0.25 ± 0.1 mm per month. Reanalysis and station-based products disagree on the direction of precipitation responses to forest loss, which we attribute to sparse in situ tropical measurements. We estimate that future deforestation in the Congo will reduce local precipitation by 8–10% in 2100. Our findings provide a compelling argument for tropical forest conservation to support regional climate resilience. | |
| dc.description.sponsorship | The research has been supported by funding from the European Research Council under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (DECAF project, grant agreement no. 771492), and the Newton Fund, through the Met Office Climate Science for Service Partnership Brazil. | |
| dc.identifier.citation | Smith, C., Baker, J.C.A. & Spracklen, D.V. Tropical deforestation causes large reductions in observed precipitation. Nature 615, 270–275 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-022-05690-1 | |
| dc.identifier.other | https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-022-05690-1 | |
| dc.identifier.uri | https://hdl.handle.net/20.500.14096/335 | |
| dc.language.iso | en | |
| dc.publisher | Springer Nature | |
| dc.title | Tropical deforestation causes large reductions in observed precipitation | |
| dc.type | Article |
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