Abstract
Human land use activities have resulted in large changes to the biogeochemical and biophysical properties of the Earth's surface, with consequences for climate and other ecosystem services. In the future, land use activities are likely to expand and/or intensify further to meet growing demands for food, fiber, and energy. As part of the World Climate Research Program Coupled Model Intercomparison Project (CMIP6), the international community has developed the next generation of advanced Earth system models (ESMs) to estimate the combined effects of human activities (e.g., land use and fossil fuel emissions) on the carbon-climate system. A new set of historical data based on the History of the Global Environment database (HYDE), and multiple alternative scenarios of the future (2015-2100) from Integrated Assessment Model (IAM) teams, is required as input for these models. With most ESM simulations for CMIP6 now completed, it is important to document the land use patterns used by those simulations. Here we present results from the Land-Use Harmonization 2 (LUH2) project, which smoothly connects updated historical reconstructions of land use with eight new future projections in the format required for ESMs. The harmonization strategy estimates the fractional land use patterns, underlying land use transitions, key agricultural management information, and resulting secondary lands annually, while minimizing the differences between the end of the historical reconstruction and IAM initial conditions and preserving changes depicted by the IAMs in the future. The new approach builds on a similar effort from CMIP5 and is now provided at higher resolution (0.25◦ × 0.25◦) over a longer time domain (850-2100, with extensions to 2300) with more detail (including multiple crop and pasture types and associated management practices) using more input datasets (including Landsat remote sensing data) and updated algorithms (wood harvest and shifting cultivation); it is assessed via a new diagnostic package. The new LUH2 products contain > 50 times the information content of the datasets used in CMIP5 and are designed to enable new and improved estimates of the combined effects of land use on the global carbon-climate system.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Article number | 241 |
| Pages (from-to) | 5425-5464 |
| Number of pages | 40 |
| Journal | Geoscientific Model Development |
| Volume | 13 |
| Issue number | 11 |
| DOIs | |
| State | Published - Nov 10 2020 |
Funding
Jed O. Kaplan was supported by the European Research Council (COEVOLVE, no. 313797). Julia Pongratz was supported by the German Research Foundation’s Emmy Noether Program (no. PO 1751/1-1). Disclaimer. Francesco N. Tubiello acknowledges funding from the FAO regular program. The FAOSTAT database is maintained by the FAO Statistics Division, with thanks to the contributing experts in member states worldwide and to Giorgia De Santis and Nathan Wanner at FAO. The views expressed in this paper are the authors’ only and do not necessarily reflect the views or policies of the FAO. Katherine Calvin was supported by the U.S. Department of Energy, Office of Science, Office of Biological and Environmental Research. Tomoko Hasegawa and Shinichiro Fujimori were supported by the Environment Research and Technology Development Fund (no. Florian Humpenöder has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation program under grant agreement nos. 821124 (NAVIGATE) and 821471 (ENGAGE). Financial support. We acknowledge the support of the U.S. Department of Energy through grant DESC0012972. This research was supported as part of the Energy Exascale Earth System Model (E3SM) project, funded by the U.S. Department of Energy, Office of Science, Office of Biological and Environmental Research. Additionally, this research was supported by NASA grants NNX13AK84A (NASA-TE), 80NSSC17K0348 (NASA-IDS), and 80NSSC17K0710 (NASA-CMS). Xin Zhang was supported by the National Science Foundation (no. CNS-1739823). Benjamin L. Bodirsky has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation program under grant agreement nos. 776479 (COACCH) and 821010 (CASCADES). David Lawrence is supported by the National Center for Atmospheric Research, which is a major facility sponsored by the NSF under cooperative agreement no. 1852977. JPMEERF20202002) of the Environmental Restoration, the Conservation Agency of Japan and JSPS KAKENHI (nos. JP20K20031, JP19K24387) of the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science, and the Sumitomo Foundation.
| Funders | Funder number |
|---|---|
| COEVOLVE | |
| Conservation Agency of Japan | |
| Environment Research and Technology Development Fund | |
| European Union’s Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation Program | |
| FAO | |
| NASA-CMS | |
| NASA-IDS | 80NSSC17K0710 |
| NASA-TE | 80NSSC17K0348 |
| Office of Biological and Environmental Research | |
| National Science Foundation | 1852977, CNS-1739823 |
| U.S. Department of Energy | DESC0012972 |
| National Aeronautics and Space Administration | NNX13AK84A |
| National Center for Atmospheric Research | |
| Office of Science | |
| Sumitomo Foundation | |
| Horizon 2020 Framework Programme | 821471, 313797, 776479, 821124, 821010 |
| European Research Council | |
| Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft | PO 1751/1-1 |
| Japan Society for the Promotion of Science | JP20K20031, JP19K24387 |
