LAnd MAnagement for CLImate Mitigation and Adaptation

LAMACLIMA investigated how land-use and land-cover changes (LULCC), such as afforestation, cropland expansion, and irrigation, will affect climate, heat stress, agriculture, and economic productivity. This was achieved by using a multidisciplinary, multi-model approach. Using output from the newest generation of climate models and economic model (GRACE), we found that global warming could increase human heat stress, thereby reducing labour capacity and increasing labour cost in agricultural production. The adverse heat stress impacts are found to be especially strong in African and Asian countries. This work was extended by further investigating the impacts of LULCC on heat stress and labour capacity, using output from new simulations of Earth system models (ESMs) conducted for this project. We found that irrigation expansion can reduce temperature, but it also increases humidity. As a result, in some regions, moist heat (i.e., a combined effect of temperature and humidity) can increase in response to irrigation expansion, thereby limiting work capacity. Afforestation and cropland expansion are found to have a non-negligible impact on heat stress and labour capacity, especially in low-latitude regions during the warmest season. In some locations, the changes of monthly average labour capacity could reach -14 and +15 percentage points. Thus, the impacts of land cover and land management changes should be accounted for when designing land-use policies to ensure sustainable development. This project also identified an important knowledge gap related to health impacts induced by LULCC. Climate-related impact studies focus mainly on health impacts induced by global warming, and little is known about how LULCC could affect health through local changes in temperature and humidity. Another important outcome of this project is future LULCC scenarios co-developed by stakeholders. These LULCC scenarios showed that global emissions from the Agriculture, Forestry and Other Land Use (AFOLU) will remain substantial if sustainable development in the land sector will be implemented only in high-income countries. Global inclusive socio-economic development would substantially reduce emissions from AFOLU. Furthermore, results of ESM simulations based on these LULCC scenarios showed that implementing a globally sustainable land use will lead to global cooling. This can reduce heat-related mortality and increase labour capacity in low latitude regions.

Three main long-term impacts achieved within the LAMACLIMA project are 1) improved understanding of the research topics related to the coupled effects between land-use and climate, as well as pathways for future global land use featuring land-based adaptation and mitigation measures allowing to reach the objectives of the Paris Agreement and broader sustainability objectives., 2) capacity building for stakeholders and scientists, and 3) improved interdisciplinary collaboration between researchers involved in the project. Continental organisations, such as the Joint Research Centre of the European Commission or the European Environment Agency, NGOs (e.g., the European Forest Institute, consultancies), and companies (e.g., NIRAS-LTS) with international presence, have been included in the key stakeholder group. The scenario co-development process, public lectures, webinars, and dissemination workshops, which were organised and conducted within the project, enhanced understanding of the research topics and allowed to build capacity of the consortium scientists and involved stakeholders. During the scenario co-development and dissemination activities, consortium scientists were exposed to scientific questions and relevant aspects of interest to the key stakeholders, which triggered ideas for future research. Most papers published as part of the project are openly accessible. Data generated within the project will be available through the long-term archives at the German Climate Computing Centre (DKRZ). This allows other researchers to investigate other related research questions, which were not addressed within the project. The network of consortium scientists will keep working together on projects covering topics tackled in LAMACLIMA beyond the project lifetime. Future collaborations between the consortium partners are already underway through other projects in which some of them participate, such as the H2020 project PROVIDE (CA, CICERO, ETH) and the Horizon Europe projects RESCUE (CA, PIK, LMU, ETH), ForestNavigator (CA, LMU, ETH), and SPARCCLE (VUB, CA, ETH). The consortium will keep seeking further opportunities for collaborations via EU-funded projects.

LAMACLIMA will first investigate the local and remote biogeophysical and biogeochemical effects of three key changes in LCLM (re/afforestation, irrigation and wood harvest) on climate and their implications for several sectors (agriculture, water availability, forestry and economic productivity). This will be achieved by comparing the results of coordinated sensitivity experiments with three Earth System Models (ESMs). The results will be integrated into a global land-use allocation model, which will be harmonised with and coupled to a computable general equilibrium model to conduct a detailed cost-benefit analysis of the different LCLM practices across several sectors. This economic assessment moves beyond traditional efforts by considering the feedback of LCLM on local climate and the resulting economic gains or losses. The results of these comprehensive sensitivity analyses of climate and economy will serve as a basis to develop a lightweight tool to support land use decision making. This tool will be an emulator representing the spatially explicit relationships between changes in LCLM, climate, food production, water availability, forest cover and economic indicators. It will be web-based, open source, user-friendly, and its usability by non-scientific users will be ensured by the collection of feedback from stakeholders from various organisation types dealing with land-use issues (such as NGOs, the industry, public institutions, regional-level adaptation planners and development actors, and scientists from outside the consortium). A stakeholder committee issued from these organisation types will also use the emulator during a dedicated workshop to help develop a set of plausible scenarios for LCLM, reflecting future worlds where priorities are set on various aspects related to the minimisation of the conversion of natural land, or the maximisation of agricultural outputs.