Impact of Land Use Change on Climate: Forest, Grassland, and Plausible Scenarios

Summary

Land use changes alter energy and water exchanges between the atmosphere and the Earth’s surface. For example, converting a forest to agricultural land changes the reflectivity and rugocity of the surface, as well as its ability to retain and release water through evapotranspiration. These biophysical effects have a significant influence on the climate at the regional and global level.

Land use changes are thus a major component of the socio-economic scenarios represented in global climate models. However, despite their importance at the regional scale, they are ignored in operational regional climate models such as the one used by Ouranos.

The project Assessment of the Impact of Land Use Change on Climate aims to:

• Deepen our understanding of the biophysical effects of land use change
• Assess the ability of the Canadian Regional Climate Model (CRCM5) to represent these effects
• Lay the foundations for their integration into the regional modelling system used by Ouranos

To meet these objectives, two sets of climate simulations were produced. The first set explores the sensitivity of CRCM5 to extreme land use changes, including complete afforestation and deforestation of North America and Europe. The second set includes two realistic land use changes scenarios developed by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

Speaker

Olivier Asselin holds a PhD in Atmospheric and Ocean Sciences from McGill University. From 2018 to 2020, he worked as a postdoctoral researcher at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography (La Jolla, CA) where he studied internal ocean waves generated by atmospheric storms. Since 2020, Olivier Asselin has been focusing on the impact of land cover change as a Climatology Specialist as part of the Support for INFO-Crue initiative.