Abstract
Over the past 50 years, temperatures on the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau (QTP) have risen roughly twice as fast as the global average, making it the most unpredictable region of environmental change due to global warming. In this paper, an Environmental Area Index model was developed using data from the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project to assess the ecological risk faced by QTP ecosystems under the influence of climate factors. The results show that ecological risk gradually decreases from northwest to the southeast, and there are different trends in ecological risk for each class in areas with different elevation gradients. As elevation increased, the proportion of potential risk areas gradually decreased, and the proportion of high- and higher-risk areas gradually increased. We predict that in the period 2021–2100, the overall ecological risk change trend on the QTP will not be obvious, but there will be a more obvious change on the vertical gradient. In general, under the existing global climate change scenario, the ecological risk faced by the QTP show a decreasing trend under the influence of climate factors, and the decrease in ecological risks is much higher at higher elevations than at lower elevations.
Highlights
Over the past 50 years, temperatures on the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau (QTP) have risen roughly twice as fast as the global average, making it the most unpredictable region of environmental change due to global warming
Based on the Environmentally Sensitive Areas Act (ESAs) method and model as well as the special geographical and environmental characteristics of the QTP, this paper constructs a quantitative evaluation model based on ecological factors that summarize the natural factors that constituting the ecological risk of climate change in climate index (CQI), soil index (SQI) and vegetation index (VQI)
The results showed that 67.32% of the soils on the QTP belonged to Low soil quality (LSQ) and General soil quality (GSQ), while only 9.82% belonged to High soil quality (HSQ) (Table 5)
Summary
Over the past 50 years, temperatures on the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau (QTP) have risen roughly twice as fast as the global average, making it the most unpredictable region of environmental change due to global warming. Keeping in mind the aforementioned objectives, this paper uses temperature, precipitation, vegetation and other data from different SSP scenarios (SSP126 scenario, SSP245 scenario, SSP370 scenario, SSP585 scenario) of the Sixth Assessment Model of the IPCC (Coupled Model Intercomparison Projects)[40,41] to calculate the climate quality index (CQI), vegetation quality index (VQI) and soil quality index (SQI). These indices were used to construct the Environmental Area Index (EAI) model for assessing the risk of the QTP based on the ESAI risk assessment model[42,43,44]. We used it to evaluate the future ecological risk of the QTP and explored possible changes in the hundred years with a view to providing a reference for human interventions, ecological barrier protection strategies, and conservation projects
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