Cloud cooling effects of afforestation and reforestation at midlatitudes, Cerasoli, Jin & Porporato 2021 Reforestation and afforestation (R&A) are well-established climate mitigation strategies in the wet tropics due to high carbon sequestration rates of forests/trees. However, at high latitudes (boreal regions), the low albedo of trees–compared to snow and other lighter land surfaces–leads to the…

Reforestation and afforestation (R&A) are well-established climate mitigation strategies in the wet tropics due to high carbon sequestration rates of forests/trees. However, at high latitudes (boreal regions), the low albedo of trees–compared to snow and other lighter land surfaces–leads to the absorption of energy, thus creating a warming effect that has a greater impact on…

By Christopher A. Haines, Biodiversity for a Livable Climate Christopher Haines is a seasoned architect licensed in both MA and NY who applies expertise in regenerative architectural design, healthy materials, preservation, renovation and specification writing to small commercial and urban projects. He has spoken for years at US and international forums as well as formally…

Soils This compendium is, if nothing else, a testament to the key role soils must play if we are to preserve life on earth through the anthropocene. Soils, the engine of every terrestrial ecosystem, are themselves wildly diverse subterranean ecosystems providing habitat to countless trillions of micro- and macro-organisms. These organisms themselves create the soil…

The industrialization that has built today’s splendid high-tech cities isolated us from the land and water sources of the materials fueling this progress. Our cities scarcely reveal that the oxygen we breathe, the food we eat, the purification of waters, and to some extent the bucolic weather patterns we have long relished have been gifts…

Earth is heating up: “Global surface temperature was 1.09°C higher in 2011– 2020 than 1850–1900,” according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)’s 6th Assessment Report.[3] Yet the mercury is not rising uniformly around the world – the Arctic is warming faster than are the lower latitudes, and temperatures over land are higher than over the…

Global change and the ecology of cities, Grimm et al. 2008 Whereas just 10 percent of people lived in cities in 1900, now more than half the global population is urban and that proportion continues to grow. Cities occupy less than 3% of the Earth’s land surface, but generate 78% of global CO2 emissions and…

With the rise of civilizations, humans began having significant impacts on bodies of water and the water cycle.  The early “hydraulic civilizations” appeared along major rivers (Nile, Tigris-Euphrates, Indus, Yellow River and others), changed watercourses and built canals for agriculture and transportation.  As populations and cities expanded, demand for food led to soil depletion while…

Water and vegetation are climate heroes, co-starring in a story about as old as terrestrial life on Earth yet under-recognized in mainstream climate politics. Not only does the vegetation embedded in ecosystems act as a giant CO2-absorption machine, constantly removing the greenhouse gas from the air and storing much of it in soil and biomass,…

Evapotranspiration – A Driving Force in Landscape Sustainability, Eiseltová 2012 Vegetation cover cools Earth when it intercepts the sun’s energy. This is not just by providing shade, but also through evapotranspiration, which is how plants regulate their own internal temperatures. For a plant … transpiration[5] is a necessity by which a plant maintains its inner environment…

Like vegetative and light or reflective surfaces, water bodies have a cooling effect on cities, reducing the Urban Heat Island effect. The average temperature at the river in this study was 1C less than at a reference point elsewhere in the city. Furthermore, the form of the landscape on the banks of an urban river…

Cultivated land covers 1.6 billion hectares globally [FAO 2011]. About 62% of cropland produces food directly for human consumption, while 35% is dedicated to producing animal feed, and 3% to biofuel feedstock, seed and other industrial products [Foley 2011: 338]. Agriculture is a major source of emissions of carbon dioxide (CO2), methane (CH4) and nitrous…

Grasslands have been estimated to cover approximately 40% of global land surface area, approximately 5.25 bn ha (~13 bn ac ), except for Greenland and Antarctica [Suttie 2005; White 2000:12].  Their deep soils are rich repositories of nutrients, especially carbon and water.  Many grasslands are anthropogenic, i.e., resulting from various land management techniques to maintain…

“The geometry, spacing and orientation of buildings and outdoor spaces” [Kleerekoper 2012: 30], as well as the prevalence of hard surfaces and reduced amount of vegetation, strongly modify the micro-climate of urban areas compared to rural surroundings. Characterized by an increase in temperature, a phenomenon referred to as urban heat island [UHI] effect has multiple…

Local temperatures are affected not only by global climatic factors, but also by radiative (albedo) and non-radiative (evapotranspiration and convection) mechanisms related to local vegetation cover. Through evapotranspiration, solar energy is converted to latent heat and released from the planet’s surface, while convection refers to the turbulent mixing of air that dissipates sensible heat. The…

Urban heat islands are created when solar energy is absorbed by non-reflective, impervious, and often rather dark surfaces, such as asphalt, stone, metal, and concrete, which are ubiquitous in cities. Exacerbating this solar energy absorption effect are abundant amounts of heat released from vehicles, factories and air conditioners, for example, as well as pollutants trapped…

Note: As mentioned in the Release notes, we have a small staff, and therefore have had to postpone some important material for the next release, scheduled for January 2018.  This is particularly true of forests and we will include a more thorough examination of their importance in addressing climate moving forward.  Nonetheless, we felt that the…

​This paper takes the innovative and paradigm-shifting position that carbon is not the primary consideration in climate; rather, water should be the central focus, integrated with carbon and energy cycles: Forest-driven water and energy cycles are poorly integrated into regional, national, continental and global decision-making on climate change adaptation, mitigation, land use and water management. This…

Scenario 300: Reducing Atmospheric CO2 to 300 ppm by 2061         by Jim Laurie, Staff Scientist Biodiversity for a Livable Climate bio4climate.org jimlaurie7@gmailcom  March 20, 2018 Danger in the Arctic: The Urgency of the Climate Situation Atmospheric carbon dioxide levels have increased from 315 ppm in 1958 to 410 ppm in 2018. This is the…

Close up on California in the era of climate change: a verdant vision for fire-prone land Picture California in the 1700s, around the time the first Spanish missions appeared. It must have looked like heaven on earth for the 100,000s of native people living there [Ecological Society of America 2014], cradled between forested mountains and…

Picture California in the 1700s, around the time the first Spanish missions appeared. It must have looked like heaven on earth for the 100,000s of native people living there [Ecological Society of America 2014], cradled between forested mountains and sparkling ocean. Meandering streams and rivers teeming with salmon criss-cross the valley and are knit together…

The amount of Earth’s green cover (measured as Leaf Area Index[6]) has increased globally since 1980, especially in northern latitudes, where growing seasons have lengthened. This is due mainly to increasing CO2 concentration, but also to warmer temperatures and changing precipitation patterns, nitrogen deposition, and land-use change (such as afforestation in China). Higher ambient CO2 can stimulate…

Indigenous hunters have positive impacts on food webs in desert Australia, Penn State 2019 When Australian authorities removed indigenous Martu people from their traditional lands in the desertic center of the continent in the mid-1900s, endemic species there declined or went extinct. Researchers observed that the Martu’s hunting regime of small burning patches of land…

The Gaia hypothesis invites us to imagine Earth as an integral living system in order to explore the mechanisms by which life helps create and maintain the conditions for life, such as an oxygenated atmosphere. “The Gaia theory proposes that organisms contribute to self-regulating feedback mechanisms that have kept the Earth’s surface environment stable and…

This compendium is, if nothing else, a testament to the key role soils must play if we are to preserve life on earth through the anthropocene. Soils, the engine of every terrestrial ecosystem, are themselves wildly diverse subterranean ecosystems providing habitat to countless trillions of micro- and macro-organisms. These organisms themselves create the soil and…

The Advancement of Science: From Paradigms to Peer Review Paradigms and How They Shift Understanding the role of paradigms in scientific investigation is one of the keys to approaching the revolutionary view of climate as a problem of ecosystem dynamics as opposed to one simply of excessive greenhouse gases.  The new paradigm doesn’t render the old…

Paradigms and How They Shift Understanding the role of paradigms in scientific investigation is one of the keys to approaching the revolutionary view of climate as a problem of ecosystem dynamics as opposed to one simply of excessive greenhouse gases.  The new paradigm doesn’t render the old paradigm irrelevant, but it reframes its significance and role…

Biodiversity refers to the outcome of 3.8 billion years of evolution since single-cellular life appeared on Earth. It is a concept embodied by an endless variety of life forms and strategies undertaken within the kingdoms of life. Biodiversity allows for a dynamic web of interactions, whereby countless organisms reliably supply one another with sufficient nutrients and…

Biodiversity Mammal diversity influences the carbon cycle through trophic interactions in the Amazon, Sobral 2017 In a mixed forest-savanna landscape of tropical Guyana researchers found that mammal diversity is positively related to carbon concentration in the soil. The authors explain that this is due to increased feeding interaction associated with greater mammal diversity, and specify…

The articles below offer a sampling of the myriad ecosystem roles played by species we may not think much about. For example, fungi, an exemplar ecosystem cooperator, buries carbon in the soil, sources otherwise unavailable nutrients like phosphorus for plant growth, and facilitates bacterial evolution. Great whales transport nutrients through the ocean for other species…

Fossil evidence shows that early land plants hosted fungal symbionts, which are likely to have facilitated phosphorus acquisition by plants and thus increased net primary production, perpetuating the transition to a cooler, oxygen-rich environment suitable for animal life. Mills’ study tests this hypothesis by integrating plant-fungal phosphorus acquisition into a biogeochemical model of the Paleozoic…

Vegetation cover cools Earth when it intercepts the sun’s energy. This is not just by providing shade, but also through evapotranspiration, which is how plants regulate their own internal temperatures. For a plant … transpiration[5] is a necessity by which a plant maintains its inner environment within the limit of optimal temperatures. And at the level…

Regenerating the soil carbon sponge is our greatest point of leverage for salvaging the planet from the point of existential climate crisis. “Sponge” refers to the quality of a biologically active soil with high organic matter content to have lots of pore space for water absorption. Jehne states that every additional gram of soil carbon…

This climate model simulation illustrates how the biosphere affects the climate system. With “maximum vegetation,” more water is absorbed in the ground, allowing for evaporation to cool the land surface while also recycling more rain. This simulation resulted in an average temperature reduction over land of 1.2C. The authors describe their approach: We quantify the maximum…

When managed with both climate adaptation and mitigation in mind, tropical reforestation (TR) can serve multiple synergistic functions. TR mitigates regional and global climate change, not only by sequestering carbon but also through biophysical cooling (via evapotranspiration), by recycling rainfall regionally, and by reducing pressure on old growth forests. Furthermore, TR helps local communities adapt to climate…

Riparian[14] ecosystems are naturally resilient, provide linear habitat connectivity, link aquatic and terrestrial ecosystems, and create thermal refugia for wildlife: all characteristics that can contribute to ecological adaptation to climate change [Seavy 2009: 330]. Arguing for the restoration of riparian areas because of their ecological significance and inherent resilience, these authors articulate the importance of both…

While previous issues of the Compendium have addressed ecosystem strategies to reverse global warming, here we discuss ecosystem restoration to adapt to the consequences of climate change. From drought in Cape Town and wildfire in California and Greece to flooding in Beijing, Paris, Houston and North Carolina, each new report of catastrophe makes climate change…

The concept of hydrological drought (as distinct from meteorological drought) helps explain the success of these age-old techniques to enhance surface and groundwater supply. Meteorological drought is the occurence of abnormally low rainfall for a given region. Hydrological drought is a consequence of meteorological drought – it happens when surface and ground waters run low thanks…

The following articles were selected and summarized by Bio4Climate’s Compendium editors and writers. The purpose of this collection is to highlight the scientific evidence and argumentation showing healthy restored and protected ecosystems as a powerful (albeit under-recognized) tool for managing the weather extremes wrought by climate change.   Floodplains and wetlands: making space for water…

Hot days in the city? It’s all about location, NOAA 2018 In a project funded by National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association (NOAA), about two dozen citizen scientists measured temperatures in Baltimore and Washington DC on two of the hottest days of 2018. By measuring temperatures second by second with thermal sensors while driving prescribed routes…

In a project funded by National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association (NOAA), about two dozen citizen scientists measured temperatures in Baltimore and Washington DC on two of the hottest days of 2018. By measuring temperatures second by second with thermal sensors while driving prescribed routes through each city, the data collectors revealed a 17-degree temperature gap between…

Guest author Gerald Pollack introduces a fundamental shift in how we view water. It has the potential to significantly alter our understandings of any processes that involve water, including aspects of climate, biology, and how we approach eco-restoration. The Fourth Phase of Water: Beyond Solid, Liquid, and Vapor Gerald H. Pollack, PhD, Professor of Bioengineering,…

Whereas just 10 percent of people lived in cities in 1900, now more than half the global population is urban and that proportion continues to grow. Cities occupy less than 3% of the Earth’s land surface, but generate 78% of global CO2 emissions and consume 76% of wood used for industrial purposes. Urban dwellers depend…

Noting that 40% of carbon emissions in the US come from the construction (including sourcing of materials) and operation (heating, cooling, lighting) of buildings and houses, the AIA pledges to achieve zero-carbon construction and operation of all new buildings, and retrofitting of existing buildings to reduce their energy use and increase their resilience to severe…

This report, led by Ban Ki Moon (UN), Bill Gates (Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation) and Kristalina Georgieva (World Bank), calls on decision makers worldwide to facilitate coordinated action to help communities adapt to climate change. Importantly, the report makes the case for nature-based adaptation approaches, which inherently help mitigation efforts as well. Adaptation measures…

All over the world, from Australia to Europe to North and South America, wildfires have waged destruction on natural landscapes and human settlements alike. The devastation of these disasters is heartbreaking, and the images of catastrophe – walls of flame, scorched wildlife, a world gone red – are unforgettable. There is no more potent image…

Our burning planet: why we must learn to live with fire, Pyne 2020 Steven J. Pyne is an emeritus professor at Arizona State University and the author of several books on fire history and policy. He wrote this opinion piece as a protest against the prevention and suppression of wildfires in our land management process.…

In this podcast interview, Dr. Chad Hanson, an ecologist and fire researcher, shares his perspective on the 2018 wildfires in the American West and some myths that have circulated about fire management in their wake. First, there is a perception that wildfires in forested regions are so devastating that they reverse the ‘carbon sink’ effect…

Turning lemons into lemonade, Sabajo et al. have used the great expansion of oil palm plantations and other crops in Indonesia to examine how such land-use change affects land surface temperature (LST). The authors observed a warming trend in the Jambi province of Sumatra of 1.05℃ and 1.56℃ in the morning and afternoon, respectively, between 2000 and 2015. The…

This article (also highlighted in Compendium v2n1) reviews research on the benefits of tree cover in relation to water and energy cycles. Forests help produce rain. Vegetation releases water vapor through transpiration, increasing atmospheric moisture that is then transported by wind. In fact, “over most of the tropics, air that passes over forests for ten…