The local cooling potential of land restoration in Africa

Abstract

Land restoration is becoming increasingly popular as a climate change mitigation and adaptation measure. It is suggested that resulting vegetation changes can impact the local surface temperature through biophysical processes such as albedo warming and evaporative cooling. Yet, the potential effect of land restoration on the local surface temperature in Africa remains uncertain. In this study, we use Terra MODIS time series of vegetation, albedo, and land surface temperature to determine vegetation-temperature relationships at a continental scale. We show that vegetation-albedo and vegetation-temperature relationships do not only vary spatially across Africa but also temporally over different time scales, with strong cooling effects in semi-arid environments. Furthermore, we predict that land restoration can decrease local land surface temperature by around 0.2 Kelvin on average. This study gives a more detailed insight into where future land restoration provides additional positive climate impacts, and where land restoration may instead warm the local environment.

Vegetation, albedo and temperature relationships vary across space and time over Africa, and cooling effects are greater in semi-arid environments than in tropical forests and humid areas, according to satellite-based time series analyses.