Impact of strictly protecting 30%–50% of global land on carbon dynamics in natural and agricultural ecosystems
Conservation is seen as a key measure to stop and reverse biodiversity loss, as well as a strategy to support global climate change mitigation since the reduced deforestation rates and ecosystem restoration enhance carbon stocks. However, it is also controversial due to potential societal impacts, such as competition for land and food security.
Congratulations! The VFF-IFU Sponsorship Award 2024, announced by the Presidential Board and the Evaluation Committee of VFF-IFU e.V. ('Friends of IFU') goes to Anita Bayer, Sven Lauterbach and Almut Arneth for their publication about benefits and trade-offs of optimized global land use.
On October 8-9, our institute hosted the annual General Assembly of the Naturance project. The assembly gathered together representatives from all partner organizations to present updates on ongoing activities and discuss the next steps for the project.
We contributed to an analysis led by colleagues from the Land-use change and climate team on how advanced photovoltaic technologies could counteract the reducing effects of changes in solar radiation and rising temperatures on the global solar photovoltaic potential.
Congratulations! Anna won, jointly with her team-mate Matt from our Frankfurt colleagues, the LPJ-GUESS “Distinguished User Award” at the LPJ-GUESS community meeting.
How will future climate change and land-use change impact global biodiversity and ecosystems?
Almut and other authors published an article in Science about the question: How will future climate change and land-use change impact global biodiversity and ecosystems? A model-intercomparison study assesses their relative importance.
Adrien defended on April 15 successfully his Ph.D. thesis, entitled Improving Permafrost Dynamics in Land Surface Models: Insights from Dual Sensitivity Experiments.
Land Use and Ecosystem Change
30th July - 7th August 2024
The Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) - Campus Alpin in Garmisch-Partenkirchen, offers a 7-day international Summer School (3-4 ECTS) on the topic of land use and ecosystem change. Participants will learn about a wide range of issues related to land use change, socio-ecological systems, ecosystem functioning, and modelling techniques.
Optimizing global land use - benefits and trade-offs
Doubling food production, saving water and increasing carbon storage at the same time - this sounds paradoxical, but would be theoretically possible, at least according to the Earth's biophysical potential.
Former team member Anita Bayer, Sven Lauterbach and Almut have published ‘how’ in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Modelling the global photovoltaic potential – how is it affected by climate change?
Ankita Saxena, Calum Brown, Almut Arneth and Mark Rounsevell published an article in Environmental Research Letters about how big the potential of solar photovoltaic energy can be in the future and by which parameters it is influenced.
Jianyong defended on May 12 successfully his Ph.D. thesis, entitled Assessing the effects of agricultural management practices on crop ecosystems with the LPJ-GUESS model.
Estimation of Cover Crop Impacts on Global Croplands
Team members Jianyong Ma, Almut Arneth, Peter Anthoni, Sam Rabin, and Anita Bayer published an article in Earth’s Future assessing the global influence of cover crops on yields and cropland carbon and nitrogen balance with the Dynamic Global Vegetation Model, LPJ-GUESS.
The European Union's Biodiversity Strategy for 2030 seeks to protect 30% of land, with 10% under strict protection, while building a transnational nature network. But, how can this influence land use change and ecosystem services provision in the future?
Extending protected areas (PA) to 30% of land and seas is the target in the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework that has received most attention. This paper, led by Almut, presents the ‘Green Shoots’ framework to help assess the complex interactions between biodiversity and other sustainability objectives.
Together with the Land Use Change & Climate Research Group of Prof. Mark Rounsevell we spent some days on top of Germany - on the Schneefernerhaus right next to the peak of Zugspitze.
A new, state-of-the-art tool to study ecosystem-climate interactions
Team members David Martin Belda, Almut Arneth and Peter Anthoni published an article in Geoscientific Model Development describing major developments into a state-of-the-art Dynamic Global Vegetation Model, LPJ-GUESS. These developments lay the ground work to use this tool to study complex interactions between the climate and the atmosphere.
How more sophisticated leaf biomass simulations can increase the realism of modelled animal populations
Team members Jens Krause, Almut Arneth and Peter Anthoni published an article in Ecological Modelling (https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ecolmodel.2022.110061). We investigated the impacts of a complex, process-based DGVM on simulated animal populations.
IPCC publishes the 6th Assessment Report of its WG2
The report repeats the warnings the scientific community has been expressing for years. Global warming, reaching 1.5°C in the near-term, is expected to cause unavoidable increases in multiple climate hazards and present multiple risks to both ecosystems and humans.
Modeling symbiotic biological nitrogen fixation in grain legumes globally with LPJ-GUESS
Biological nitrogen fixation (BNF) from grain legumes is of significant importance in global agricultural ecosystems. Crops with BNF capability are expected to support the need to increase food production while reducing nitrogen (N) fertilizer input for agricultural sustainability, but quantification of N fixing rates and BNF crop yields remains inadequate on a global scale.
Restoring degraded land will generate co-benefits for climate change mitigation and adaptation and more broadly for human and societal well-being and the economy
Almut led an invited review paper to ARER that summarises the multiple challenges of land degradation and highlights the many co-benefits arising from restoring degraded lands.
Biodiversity loss and climate change are both driven by human economic activities and mutually reinforce each other. Neither will be successfully resolved unless both are tackled together.
Diverging land-use projections cause large variability in their impacts on ecosystems
Team members Anita Bayer, Almut Arneth and Peter Anthoni published a study in Earth System Dynamics demonstrating the large variability in ecosystem service indicators caused by diverging future land-use scenarios.
The annual update on the global carbon budget, which is led by the Global Carbon Project is published. Our team contributes to these regular updates with LPJ-GUESS simulations.
Post-2020 biodiversity targets need to embrace climate change
A considerable number of existing and proposed post-2020 biodiversity targets by international organizations are at risk of being severely compromised due to climate change, even if other barriers such as habitat exploitation are removed argue the authors of a study led by Almut Arneth. According to their analysis published in PNAS, global warming accelerates the loss of biodiversity. Vice versa, measures to protect biodiversity may also mitigate the impacts of climate change. The authors suggest that flexible approaches to conservation would allow dynamic responses to the effects of climate change on habitats and species.
Published: A comprehensive quantification of global nitrous oxide sources and sinks
Nitrous oxide (N₂O), like carbon dioxide, is a long-lived greenhouse gas that accumulates in the atmosphere. Over the past 150 years, increasing atmospheric N₂O concentrations have contributed to stratospheric ozone depletion and climate change, with the current rate of increase estimated at 2 per cent per decade.
Vegetation biomass change in China in the 20th century: an assessment based on a combination of multi-model simulations and field observations
Simulations with LPJ-GUESS done within the FireMIP project contributed to this study in ERL, which investigated the impact of land use change and climate change on vegetation biomass in China.
Almut Arneth participated in the GIZ Web Talk "Biodiversity Matters: Die biologische Vielfalt bewahren – unsere Zukunft sichern"
Almut Arneth participated in the GIZ Web Talk "Biodiversity Matters: Die biologische Vielfalt bewahren – unsere Zukunft sichern". Her input to the discussion can be found here (in German and English)
The world’s biggest terrestrial carbon sinks are found in young forests.
More than half of the carbon sink in the world’s forests is in areas where the trees are relatively young – under 140 years old – rather than in tropical rainforests, an international team of researchers including Almut Arneth shows. These trees have typically ‘regrown’ on land previously used for agriculture, or cleared by fire or harvest and it is their young age that is one of the main drivers of this carbon uptake. Previously it had been thought that the carbon uptake by forests was overwhelmingly due to fertilisation of tree growth by increasing levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. However, the analysis published in PNAS (www.pnas.org/cgi/doi/10.1073/pnas.1810512116) demonstrates that areas where forests are re-growing take up large amounts of carbon not only due to these fertilisation effects, but also as a result of their younger age.
Forest disturbance play important role for land carbon sinks and climate.
We contributed to an international study, led by our former team member Tom Pugh, published in Nature Climate Change which demonstrates the large importance of accounting for frequency and extend of disturbance for carbon cycling in forest ecosystems. The work highlights how even small changes in disturbance interval, for instance through climate change or human forest management, would impact today’s forest carbon sink.
The annual update on the global carbon budget, which is led by the Global Carbon Project is published. Our team contributes to these regular updates with LPJ-GUESS simulations.
Biodiversity loss worldwide – we cannot continue with a ‘business-as-usual’
An article published in Science (http://dx.doi.org/10.1126/science.aax3100) by authors of the Global Assessment of the IBPES (https://ipbes.net/news/global-assessment-summary-policymakers-final-version-now-available) warns of the continued over-exploitation of the earth’s resources which are vital for human societies. Evidence across scientific disciplines that was brought together for the report demonstrated unequivocally, that—like climate change—the loss of biodiversity on land, in freshwater and oceans impedes severely our possibilities towards achieving many Sustainable Development Goals. The declining trend in many indicators related to the integrity of natural ecosystems can be turned around through a number of integrated actions that include innovative governance approaches, as well as informed individual decision making.
Almut Arneth received a Distinguished Visiting International Fellowship under the Western Sydney University Vice Chancellor’s Research Fellowship Programme
She will be visiting the Hawkesbury Institute for the Environment at WSU in spring 2019 and 2020 to initial sustained cooperation and joint research activities with Australian colleagues on topics related to the role of terrestrial ecosystems and their management under land-use change and climate change.
A team of researchers including some of our team’s members has published a study titled “The role of global dietary transitions for safeguarding biodiversity” in Global Environmental Change (https://doi.org/10.1016/j.gloenvcha.2019.101956). The study emphasises that diets low in animal products reduce agricultural expansion and reduce agricultural intensity in biodiverse regions.
Land and land management is critical to keep global warming to well below 2ºC
The IPCC approved and accepted Climate Change and Land: an IPCC special report on climate change, desertification, land degradation, sustainable land management, food security, and greenhouse gas fluxes in terrestrial ecosystems at its 50th Session held on 2 – 7 August 2019 in Geneva. The approved Summary for Policymakers (SPM) was presented at a press conference on 8 August 2019. Almut Arneth was Coordinating Lead author of chapter 1 in the report and participated in the IPCC plenary session.
