Open AccessRise and fall of vegetation annual primary production resilience to climate variability projected by a large ensemble of Earth System Models’ simulations
Author(s) -
Matteo Zampieri,
Bruna Grizzetti,
Andrea Toreti,
Pierluca De Palma,
Alessio Collalti
Publication year - 2021
Publication title -
environmental research letters
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 2.37
H-Index - 124
ISSN - 1748-9326
DOI - 10.1088/1748-9326/ac2407
Subject(s) - primary production , environmental science , climate change , earth system science , resilience (materials science) , sustainability , environmental resource management , ecosystem , vegetation (pathology) , psychological resilience , production (economics) , climatology , physical geography , geography , ecology , medicine , psychology , physics , macroeconomics , pathology , economics , psychotherapist , biology , geology , thermodynamics
Climate change is affecting natural ecosystems and society. Anticipating its impacts on vegetation resilience is critical to estimate the ecosystems’ response to global changes and the reliability of the related ecosystem services, to support mitigation actions, and to define proper adaptation plans. Here, we compute the Annual Production Resilience Indicator from gross primary production (GPP) data simulated by a large ensemble of state-of-the-art Earth System Models involved in the last Coupled Model Intercomparison Project (CMIP6) of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. In the Sustainability (Taking the Green Road) and Middle of the Road scenarios (ssp126 and ssp245), the areas where vegetation shows increasing GPP resilience are wider than the areas with decreasing resilience. The situation drastically reverses in the Fossil-fuel Development (Taking the Highway) scenario (ssp585). Among the larger countries, Brazil is exposed to the highest risk of experiencing years with anomalously low GPP, especially in the Taking the Highway scenario.