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Abstract Anthropogenic climate change is projected to drive increases in climate extremes and climate-sensitive ecosystem disturbances such as wildfire with enormous economic impacts. Understanding spatial and temporal patterns of risk to property values from climate-sensitive disturbances at national and regional scales and from multiple disturbances is urgently needed to inform risk management and policy efforts. Here, we combine models for three major climate-sensitive disturbances (i.e., wildfire, climate stress-driven tree mortality, and insect-driven tree mortality), future climate projections of these disturbances, and high-resolution property values data to quantify the spatiotemporal exposure of property values to disturbance across the contiguous United States (US). We find that property values exposed to these climate-sensitive disturbances increase sharply in future climate scenarios, particularly in existing high-risk regions of the western US, and that novel exposure risks emerge in some currently lower-risk regions such as the southeast and Great Lakes regions. Climate policy that drives emissions towards low-to-moderate climate futures avoids large increases in disturbance risk exposure compared to high emissions scenarios. Our results provide an important large-scale assessment of climate-sensitive disturbance risk to property values to help inform land management and climate adaptation efforts.
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Future climate risks from stress, insects and fire across US forests
Abstract Forests are currently a substantial carbon sink globally. Many climate change mitigation strategies leverage forest preservation and expansion, but rely on forests storing carbon for decades to centuries. Yet climate‐driven disturbances pose critical risks to the long‐term stability of forest carbon. We quantify the climate drivers that influence wildfire and climate stress‐driven tree mortality, including a separate insect‐driven tree mortality, for the contiguous United States for current (1984–2018) and project these future disturbance risks over the 21st century. We find that current risks are widespread and projected to increase across different emissions scenarios by a factor of >4 for fire and >1.3 for climate‐stress mortality. These forest disturbance risks highlight pervasive climate‐sensitive disturbance impacts on US forests and raise questions about the risk management approach taken by forest carbon offset policies. Our results provide US‐wide risk maps of key climate‐sensitive disturbances for improving carbon cycle modeling, conservation and climate policy.
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- PAR ID:
- 10445325
- Publisher / Repository:
- Wiley-Blackwell
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Ecology Letters
- Volume:
- 25
- Issue:
- 6
- ISSN:
- 1461-023X
- Format(s):
- Medium: X Size: p. 1510-1520
- Size(s):
- p. 1510-1520
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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