Poster: The carbon and climate impacts of forestation in Australia
About
Forestation is considered to be a feasible and cost effective strategy to remove CO2 from the atmosphere and store it in natural reservoirs. However, it is highly uncertain how much carbon can be removed by forests or how much they will affect the climate at the local to global scales. While Australia has some forestation potential to support meeting its Paris Agreement pledges, it is unknown how changes in the climate might affect this potential and how the associated decreased albedo of forested areas can offset the climate cooling effect achieved through increased uptake of CO2. We use the ACCESS-ESM1.5 Earth system model to perform idealized experiments of forestation to investigate the effects of forest cover has on the Australian climate at a range of global warming levels. Experiments include sensitivity tests by replacing all croplands or a specific fraction of croplands with up to 0.58 M km² of forests. We find that forestation on these lands can remove up to 80 M tonnes of carbon per year and cool Australia’s mean climate by ~0.4 °C, however, ACCESS-ESM1.5 projects some localized warming where forestation occurs. With careful forest management to account for localized warming, forestation has considerable potential in Australia to remove CO2 and contribute to meeting net-zero targets.
Poster
ACCESS-NRI_workshop_2023_poster.pdf (2.3 MB)
Note: this topic is part of the 2024 ACCESS Community Workshop Poster session