Impacts of land use change on climate
The US National Research Council (NRC, 2005) recommended the expansion of the climate change issue to include land use and land-cover processes as an important climate forcing. These processes have not been a major component of past Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) reports. The NRC report states that beyond the change in mean atmospheric composition caused by increasing greenhouse gases, landscape variations may have important local, regional and potentially global climatic implications. In some cases, the climate response to land use and land-cover change may even exceed the contribution from increasing greenhouse gases. 'Improving societally relevant projections of regional climate impacts will require a better understanding of the magnitudes of regional forcings and the associated climate responses.' The International Geosphere Biosphere Programme (IGBP) and the Global Energy and Water Cycle Experiment (GEWEX) have also identified the importance of understanding the climate response to land use and land-cover change. As we move forward to the Fifth Assessment Report of the IPCC, there is growing impetus to address this aspect of anthropogenic impacts on the planet's environment. As a matter of fact, the CMIP5 suite of climate simulations that will be run for this report assessment (http://cmip-pcmdi.llnl.gov/cmip5/) now includes a new forcing dataset: the changes in land-surface areas used for agriculture, grazing activities, forestry, etc.