The mutual importance of anthropogenically and climate‐induced changes in global vegetation cover for future land carbon emissions in the MPI‐ESM CMIP5 simulations

Abstract

AbstractBased on the Max Planck Institute Earth System Model simulations for the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project Phase 5 and on simulations with the submodel Cbalone we disentangle the influence of natural and anthropogenic vegetation changes on land carbon emissions for the years 1850 until 2300. According to our simulations, climate‐induced changes in distribution and productivity of natural vegetation strongly mitigates future carbon (C) emissions from anthropogenic land‐use and land cover change (LULCC). Depending on the assumed scenario, the accumulated carbon emissions until the year 2100 are reduced between 22 and 49% and until 2300 between 45 and 261%. The carbon storage due to climate‐induced vegetation change is generally stronger under the presence of LULCC. This is because the natural vegetation change can reestablish highly productive extratropical forests that are lost due to LULCC. After stopping anthropogenic vegetation changes in the year 2100 the refilling of depleted C pools on formerly transformed land takes (dependent on the scenario) time scales of centuries.