Can land based agricultural management reduce heat extremes in Australia? — Australian Meteorological and Oceanographic Society

Can land based agricultural management reduce heat extremes in Australia? (#142)

Jatin J.K Kala 1
  1. Murdoch University, Murdoch, WA, Australia

The Paris agreement aims to limit global warming to well below 2.0°C, and pursue efforts to limit the temperature increase even further to 1.5°C. However, current mitigation measures to reduce greenhouse gas emissions globally have so far proven inadequate in slowing the rate of global warming. As a result several approaches have been suggested to limit warming. One approach is to alter agricultural land-use management so as to increase the albedo of agricultural land in a effort to reduce warming regionally. Studies to date have used global earth system models which do not represent agricultural land-use in Australia adequately due to their coarse resolution. This is the first study to investigate the potential for agricultural land-use management to reduce extremes heat conditions in Australia, using high resolution regional climate modelling. Results show that cereal crop albedo enhancement could potentially reduce warming by up to 1.0°C, however, this would require relatively large increases in crop albedo of up to 0.1. The study will also show benefits of conservation agriculture via no-till farming.

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