Climate Change Could Impact Ecosystems Across Boreal Forests, Tundra Regions Up to the Year 2500 [Study]

Boreal forests are Earth's northernmost forests. This biome covers swathes of land across Canada and Alaska, northern Europe, and Russia. The boreal system is home to a wide range of flora and fauna, which is rich in wildlife populations. Meanwhile, the treeless and shrubland region known as the tundra, located below the ice caps of the Arctic or near the North Pole also has its wildlife, including the polar bear and arctic fox.

However, the biodiversity and environmental integrity of both the boreal forest and tundra region could be at stake due to climate change. This is according to a new study led by an international team of researchers from the United Kingdom, Canada, and Switzerland, who predicted that both could be among the most impacted by climate change up to the year 2500. Within this period, ecosystems can shift or be damaged.

Boreal Forest and Tundra Region

Climate Change Could Impact Ecosystems Across Boreal Forests, Tundra Regions Up to the Year 2500 [Study] — (Photo : Photo by Vadim Sherbakov on Unsplash)

Findings about the future of Earth's boreal forest and tundra region over the next 500 years are published in the journal Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B on Monday, April 8. In the study, researchers from White Rose universities from York, Leeds, and Oxford in the UK, Montreal in Canada, and ETH Zurich in Switzerland utilized a widely-used climate model to determine the said long-term climate change prediction.

The model shows that boreal forests, Earth's most significant site of carbon storage and clean water, and tundra regions, which is vital in regulating the Earth's climate, could become a different environment from the ones that we see today. The 500-year prediction surpasses previous climate models which only shows the impact of climate change on temperature and precipitation until the year 2100, according to the study's authors.

To address the data gap, the new research paper used a general circulation model to map future climate change every 20 years from the period 2000 to 2500 CE, under different carbon dioxide emissions scenarios. The research team also applied a biome model to these simulated climate futures to investigate shifts in climatic forcing on vegetation worldwide and potential overlap with human land use and other anthropogenic factors.

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Current Climate Change Statistics

The climate crisis is a recurring theme in scientific literature and different forms of non-academic media over the past century, amid a warming planet. In the context of climate change, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) states that Earth's global temperature has increased by an average of 0.11 degrees Fahrenheit (0.06 degrees Celsius) per decade since the year 1850, which is 2 degrees Fahrenheit in total.

Overall, Earth has been recorded to be warmer in 2023 than in the late 19^th century by 2.45 degrees Fahrenheit (1.36 degrees Celsius), with the 10 most recent years (preceding 2023) being the warmest on record in history, according to the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA).