The interaction between climate and ecological restoration: a climate and land use model approach for the Cerrado
Downscaling; surface temperature; soil moisture; fire; fuel
Human activity has altered the biogeochemist cycles, leading to environmental changes all around the world. We can already observe a 1,09ºC increase in Earth’s mean temperature with great impacts on all living organisms. The main cause of climate change is the emission of greenhouse gases (GHG) in the atmosphere. Globally, the use of fossil fuels is the main source of GHG, however, land use change and agriculture also have a great importance in this process, representing 22% of the emissions in 2019. Brazil occupies the fifth place on global GHG emissions, with 2,16 PgCO2 released to the atmosphere in 2020, 46% coming from land use change. Global warming projections warn us of catastrophic consequences and a short window of time for actions, making the drastic reduction of GHG emission and the mitigation of climate change essential and urgent. Ecological restoration is one of the most studied mitigation strategies, having potential of removing carbon from the atmosphere and store it in vegetation, as well as reducing the local impacts of environmental changes. In the Cerrado, the environmental debt, which is the land that must be restored by law, corresponds to 6,1 Mha way lower than the 20 Mha indicated as priority for retoration in the biome. It is estimated that the restoration of those 20 Mha may store 20,6 GgC as well as provide ecosystem services and aid the biodiversity conservation. Understanding how restored ecosystems interact with new climate conditions in which degradation drivers, such as fire, become more frequent and intense is necessary. In this way, the main goal of this project is do model the impacts of ecological restoration in the local climate of the Cerrado biome, and to model how the fire degradation dynamics can affect the restored areas. To achieve this goal, we will use the Conformal-Cubic Atmospheric Model coupled to the CISRO Atmosphere-Biosphere Land Exchange Model to project local climatic variables for the Cerrado. The projections will consider three land use scenarios (Full-restoration, Partialrestoraton e No-restoration) from 2020 to 2050. This is a free access model that has been widely used for dynamic downscaling of global climate models. The outputs from the climate models will be used as variables in a Geografically Weighted Regression to project the fuel availability and the wildfire probability for the next 30 years in the Cerrado.