Climate change having a more negative impact on forests than first thought
Researchers at the University of Plymouth are behind a new study
As world leaders gather at the COP30 UN climate conference in Brazil, a study led by researchers at the University of Plymouth has found 'climate change could significantly increase the temperatures found within the canopies of the world’s woodlands and forests'.
Dr Sophie Fauset, Associate Professor in Terrestrial Ecology at the University of Plymouth and the study’s senior author, added: “We are increasingly relying on trees to mitigate against future environmental change, but this study shows how the changes already happening are having a negative effect on our forests.
"Our findings are clear evidence that leaf temperature is going up simply as a consequence of increased CO2 and regardless of any other factors.
"Our tree populations have adapted to their environments over many centuries, but whether they will continue to do so at a time of such swift environmental change is an obvious cause for concern.”
The study found that temperatures within the forest canopies rose by around 1.3°C as a direct consequence of increases in CO2 – from an average of 21.5°C under current conditions to 22.8°C at the predicted 2050 CO2 levels. However, the difference was even more noticeable in extreme heatwaves – as experienced in the UK in the summer of 2022 – where the difference was more than 2°C and the highest recorded leaf temperature rose to around 40°C.
There's more about the study here which is published in the journal Global Change Biology. The study was led by researchers at the University of Plymouth working alongside partners from the University of Birmingham, University of Leeds, Northern Arizona University and the Forestry Research Institute of Ghana.
It come as 'predicted global temperature rise this century' has fallen slightly to 2.8C under current policies - according to UN experts said as they warned this week that the world was still heading for a serious escalation in impacts. And even if countries delivered on promised action, it would lead to temperature rises of 2.3C to 2.5C, it reported.
While these predictions were down slightly from last year's figures, UNEP said methodological updates to its assessment accounted for some of the decline.
It also said the upcoming withdrawal of the US from the Paris Agreement would cancel out some of the progress, meaning the world had barely moved the needle in terms of ambition.
The warning comes ahead of this year's UN Cop30 talks in the city of Belem in Brazil's Amazon, where nations will focus on boosting implementation efforts in the face of growing geopolitical division over climate action.
At the Paris climate talks in 2015, countries agreed to limit temperature rises to "well below" 2C and pursue efforts to curb them to 1.5C above pre-industrial levels.
Scientists have warned there is no safe amount of climate change, but 1.5C has come to be seen as a threshold beyond which the worst impacts of climate change-driven heatwaves, droughts, floods, collapse of natural systems and rising sea levels will be felt.
Nations have set out country-level action plans, known as nationally determined contributions (NDCs), for meeting the Paris targets, through cutting emissions from activities such as burning fossil fuels and creating or restoring habitats such as forests to capture carbon.
Governments were supposed to submit updated NDCs covering emissions cuts for the 2025-2035 period by September 30.
But less than a third had put forward their updated plans so far, UNEP said, meaning the majority had missed the deadline, which had already been extended from February.
Meanwhile, countries were off-track even for their older 2030 NDCs, let alone new 2035 targets, it said.
As world leaders prepared to gather for the UN climate summit in the coming days, the UN agency was warning that the long-term average of global temperature rise would exceed 1.5C, at least temporarily, and likely this decade.
On Thursday there was calls for more poets going into UK schools cto help teach children about climate change without making them feel "guilty or responsible."
Author Michael Rosen has said he would like to see positive examples of climate action woven throughout the UK curriculum. More than 20 poets have been matched with climate scientists to deliver climate education in schools through poetry as part of an initiative called "Hot Poets Ignite".
Rosen, who has written one of the poems, told the PA News Agency the initiative hopes to talk to pupils about climate change, "about the urgency for us to be taking action and looking at wonderful initiatives that are taking place".
The poems will avoid "the pitfalls of someway or another making children feel guilty or responsible, because clearly they're not", he said