As nations prepare to mitigate climate change, decision makers need to understand how land use fits into the climate equation.
A new study looked at land use changes over two decades and found a major shift from cropland to forests. That change made western Europe cooler.
If you’ve ever sat in the cool shade of a tree on a hot summer day, you already know that shaded areas are cooler than open fields. But is that kind of cooling enough to make a difference in the hotter world of the future?
When a team of researchers looked at more than 20 years of recent land use changes for Europe and combined that with a climate model to provide information on temperatures during the same period, they found the answer to this question is a clear yes.
“When we put all the land cover changes together and looked at how these affected climate, we found a widespread seasonal cooling — up to one degree C in the summer — in western Europe,” said Francesco Cherubini, the senior author of a newly published paper on the findings in Nature Communications and head of the Industrial Ecology Programme at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology.
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