CMI Annual Report 2021

Future Fires Compromise Amazon Forest Resilience to
Climate Change
PRINCIPAL INVESTIGATOR: ELENA SHEVLIAKOVA
At a Glance
Assessments of alternative mitigation strategies to limit the
impact of global change increasingly rely on simulations of
Earth System Models (ESMs). In the tropics, a major
biodiversity refuge and a net sink for anthropogenic carbon
dioxide (CO 2
) emissions, ESMs consistently project that forests
will thrive through the century due to CO 2
fertilization. In
contrast, ecological models warn about a potential
catastrophic forest loss under future drying conditions. A team
of CMI researchers from the Pacala group and NOAA-GFDL
used a state-of-the-art ESM to assess the impact of global
change on tropical forest dynamics under alternative emission
scenarios. Their ESM accounts, for the first time, for complex
ecological mechanisms and large-scale biophysical forcing of
vegetation dynamics. This research has broad consequences
for the monitoring and management of tropical forests and
opens new avenues for the design and implementation of
carbon mitigation strategies. Of particular relevance to bp’s
natural climate solutions initiatives, this work informs the
stability of carbon mitigated through avoided deforestation in
tropical regions.
Land Model LM4.1 development and testing were guided by extensive analyses of global databases and
of more than 30 years of continued study and monitoring at Barro Colorado Island (BCI), Panama.