Assessment of the Climate Sensitivity of Land-Based Mitigation Technologies
LANDMARC is proud to announce the completion of Deliverable 4.2 - Assessment of the Climate Sensitivity of Land-Based Mitigation Technologies. It provides an overview of the work that has been done on the sensitivity of Land-based Mitigation Technology (LMT) approaches to climate variations to better understand the climate conditions that favor or compromise biomass production and CO2 sequestration potentials.
The document identifies that the main atmospheric variables driving significant changes in carbon and land cover are temperature and precipitation. The temperature (range), drought (intensity, frequency), or possibly atmospheric CO2 concentration is potentially the future strongest climate risks for LMTs.
Solar-Induced Chlorophyll Fluorescence (SIF) maps showed to be a very powerful tool to study plants biomass and CO2 sequestration potential for specific local interventions for climate change adaptation. It can potentially be used to define bioindicators for specific regions to help better design specific policies in terms of the species (i.e., plant genetics and their resilience to climate change in plant-dependent LMTs) that must be considered for future plantations and climate change adaptation. Although this SIF approach showed to be promising, further studies/analyses between SIF and specific climate-related risks should be developed to achieve a robust quantitative understanding of the sensitivity of LMTs to carbon uptake.
Overall, the assessments performed in all sections of this report produce similar sets of key climatic risk factors, including temperature (high extremes), drought (intensity and frequency), and precipitation (decreasing, unpredictability, and/or strong) that can negatively affect the effectiveness of LMTs. As such, these key risk factors may constitute a limitation in the large-scale implementation of LMTs at the plant development level and consequent carbon uptake (emission reduction and carbon removal). Further, the analysis of climate change scenarios for risk factors relevant to LMT should not decouple temperature and precipitation.
