Publications

The papers in this special issue of Regional Environmental Change address the question of what may be dangerous levels of climate change: the papers describe and analyse the vulnerability of human and natural systems in a number of regions around the world.

Despite large uncertainty, there are several robust conclusions from published literature for policy makers and research agendas: agriculture everywhere in Africa runs some risk to be negatively affected by climate change; existing cropping systems and infrastructure will have to change to meet future demand.

Here the main characteristics of the new version 1.2 of the three-dimensional Earth system model of intermediate complexity LOVECLIM are briefly described.

Of current anthropogenic CO2 emissions, about 30% is absorbed by the oceans, in response to the higher CO2 concentration of the atmosphere. The net absorption by the oceans will stop when the equilibrium is restored at the ocean’s surface. This will only occur gradually after the atmospheric concentration ceases to rise.

This study describes the coupling of the dynamic global vegetation model (DGVM), Lund–Potsdam–Jena Model for managed land (LPJmL), with the general circulation model (GCM), Simplified Parameterizations primitivE Equation DYnamics model (SPEEDY), to study the feedbacks between land-use change and natural vegetation dynamics and climate during the 20th century.