 I think we are more than 50 people online already, so let's start with this force technical network seminar that we have today on the other climate change. As reducing emissions from deforestation and forest degradation, we're using forests to increase carbon sinks. Now and again, something else comes up, but it rarely holds our attention for very long. But since David Kamowicz joined the forest management team meeting earlier this year, he has constantly brought up the idea of what he calls the other climate change. Basically, what he means is that all of the ways forests affect climate that don't revolve around carbon or other greenhouse gases. He's argued pretty hard that forests provide other important environmental services that we barely hear about, that there is a scientific revolution going on and this is on the cutting edge. And he believes that this might be a major niche for FAO's climate work going forward. He raised this issue so often, we figured it would be good to get a better sense of what he was actually talking about. So we've invited him to give this first technical network talk to share his ideas. Dave is an economist, he's not a climate scientist and he would be the first to tell you that he's not an expert on today's topic. But in recent years, he has spent time talking to the real experts and reading what they write. And he's also invested time in figuring out what this all means for forest policy and how to communicate it to a wider audience. So we think you might all benefit from hearing what David has to say. And then we might consider where to take it from here. David would talk for about 45 to 50 minutes, then we would open up for questions and answers. So I'll encourage you to use the chat box to post some of the questions that you may have. He'll start by explaining what the other climate change is. And then he will discuss its effects and what it implies for policy. So without further ado, I turn it over to David. Thank you. Thank you very much, and good afternoon to those in Europe. Good evening to those in Asia. Good morning. Good morning to those in the Americas. It's really a pleasure to be giving this talk today. Tonya, you can start the PowerPoint, please. This is a topic that I'm very excited about, that I've been working on for the last four or five years here and there. As Mette said, this is not a topic that I consider myself a real expert on. But for the last four or five years, I have been working with a group of about a dozen real experts on this topic who have been doing different sorts of literature reviews and different sorts of specific pieces of research. And we've been thinking about how to communicate this. And there are three things that really excite me about this topic. Mette, can you hear me? Can everyone hear me? Please, back to the previous slide, please. Yes, we can hear you. Okay, wonderful. Three things that really excite me about this topic. The first is that in itself, it's a fascinating topic. It's at the cutting edge of science. And there's lots of different pieces that we're learning so much more about how the climate works and how it relates to land use and forests every day. Second, it's incredibly important in terms of this magnitude of the impacts and the different ways it affects people's daily lives. And third, even though it's a topic that scientists are increasingly clear about, it's practically been ignored by the mass media and by the forest policy world. So there's this huge gap between what science is telling us and what the forest policy world has been talking about. Next please, Tony. Now, why do I call this the other climate change? When we talk about climate change and we go to the definitions, the definitions that most people are using. I went to Wikipedia and it says climate change includes both global warming driven by human emissions of greenhouse gases and the resulting large scale shifts in weather patterns. So you see here the emphasis on emissions of greenhouse gases. When we go to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, the agency that is responsible for talking about climate change, again it says to achieve stabilization of greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere. But what's become increasingly clear is that the other things that we're doing to change the climate, it's not just greenhouse gas emissions. The ways we're changing land use, the ways we're deforestation, reforestation, the ways vegetation is interacting with the climate are ways that human beings are changing the climate. And that through a number of different pathways that are not just about carbon emissions or carbon sequestration or methane or other greenhouse gas emissions. Next please. Now when I first started thinking about this topic, and amazing as it may sound, that was almost 30 years ago. The conventional scientific wisdom was essentially land use besides carbon had very little effect on the climate. There were some famous studies in the early 1980s, I'm sorry, in the late 1980s by Anais Salati that basically said, all right, if we deforested the entire Amazon basin and all the forest from it, that would have a significant effect on rainfall and that would have a significant effect on climate. But everybody assumed that that was such an extreme scenario. Nobody was ever going to deforest the entire Amazon basin. And all of the scientific wisdom was the conventional wisdom is the time if you change relatively small areas of forest, if you reforested 100,000 hectares here or if you deforested 100,000 hectares there, that would really have essentially no impact on the climate. And in fact, most of the impacts that it does have on the climate from a methodological perspective were almost impossible for us to study 20 or 30 years ago. There were no big flux towers that were up there measuring exactly where the water that was going into the rain was coming from or that were measuring many of these subtle changes in the chemical composition of the atmosphere. Our remote sensing was still very much in an early day. There was no big data that allowed us to look at all of these things across the world and our climate models were still very basic. So when we went back and we did a literature review in the last couple of years on the research about this other climate change, what we found was that 80, 90% of the most important research has really been done in the last 10 years, the last 15 years. There's a whole world of understanding about the climate and how the climate interacts with forest and land use that we just simply didn't have 20 or 30 years ago. Next please. Let me start with just some basic concepts of what we're talking about. And then we're going to go into talking about why this is so important. Most of what the UN climate change convention focuses on in terms of greenhouse gas emissions is about this concept of global warming. What do we mean by global warming? What we mean by global warming essentially is a certain amount of energy comes in from the sun to the planet, to our atmosphere. And some of that goes back out, but a lot of it gets trapped in the atmosphere. And there are two main things that are really kind of influencing how much of that energy gets trapped in the atmosphere and how much warming goes happens, if you will, in that regard. The first are the biochemical processes, the different chemical interactions in the atmosphere themselves. And those are mostly influenced in terms of global temperature by these greenhouse gas emissions and greenhouse gas sinks that the Climate Change Convention has been talking about, largely about carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous oxide. And then there's another set of things which are more biophysical that aren't about the chemistry, but are about the physics of this. And you can think about the main biophysical thing that affects radiative forcing, kind of if you think about when you wear a white t-shirt and a black t-shirt. If you wear a white t-shirt, you don't get very hot because most of the sun that hits you and your body reflects back out into the sky. In scientific terms, that means that it has a high albedo. Most of it is being reflected out. So it goes down to the earth and because of this high albedo, it reflects right back into the sky. If it has a low albedo, it means that it stays in the earth. It gets absorbed by the things that hits and it heats up the globe as part of global warming. Now, this albedo, what albedo we're talking about, we're talking about sunlight that hits the land and the forest. So the things that are actually on the ground, sunlights that hits the clouds and reflects back into the sky and sunlights that hits aerosols, all of the different pollen, soot, smoke, little bits of dirt that are in the atmosphere that also either absorb that light or reflect it back. Those are the main things that affect average global temperature. And so when we hear that the world is going to rise in temperature 1.5 degrees compared to what it was before human beings started changing it, those are most of the things that are affecting that average global temperature. But it's important to say that average global temperature, this thing that we call global warming is not the only aspect that's important about our climate. We're not just interested in the average global temperature. We're interested in how much it gets hot in this location, how much it rains in that place. And that's not just about radiative forcing. That's about other processes that are also changing the climate in some very significant ways that may not be so important in terms of radiative forcing, but are very important for the climate. Each of us experience in terms of the heat we feel, the rain that falls on our head, the winds that are blowing in our face. Next, please, to give you a sense of this, let's start with evapotranspiration. And here's a little video about the evapotranspiration just in the Amazon basin to give you an idea of how much water we're talking about is going from vegetation into the sky. Hit the video, please. That's thanks to 400 billion geysers shooting water into the sky, not geysers like those trees. When pores on leaves open up during photosynthesis, plants also lose a lot of water. Like what happens when you suck on a straw, this evaporation pulls water from the roots to the tops of trees up to 60 meters off the ground. A large tree in the Amazon can release a thousand liters of water into the atmosphere every day. All together, trees in the Amazon basin release 20 billion tons of water or 20 trillion liters each day. It's enough to fill eight million Olympic swimming pools. Which I'm pretty sure you can't really picture, but it's true. So get back, please. Tony, back to the. So that's an awful lot of water going into the sky, a huge amount of water going in from the Amazon basin, but also a huge amount of water going in from other trees around the world. And what effect does that have on the climate? It essentially has two effects. First, a lot of that water is actually helping to make rain. More water is leading to more rain. It used to be that scientists used to say the fact that there's a lot more trees where it rains more is basically because more rain leads to more trees. It's not that more trees lead to more rain. But as we've been able to study these processes better, we understand that that's not that true, that, in fact, less trees does lead to less rain. And we'll get back to that as we go ahead in the talk. The second thing is in addition to the huge amount of water that's going into the sky, a huge amount of energy is being consumed to push that water into the sky, to make it evaporate and reach the clouds. How much energy are we talking about? That same film that you just heard a bit from says that it takes 30,000 hydroelectric plants the size of the three gorgeous dam to evaporate all the water from the Amazon rainforest into the sky each year. That's a huge amount of energy, almost unimaginable. Now, what happens with that energy? Essentially, that energy goes from being heat at ground level and moves in the vapor up into the sky, essentially leaving the areas on the ground much cooler than it would be otherwise. So it's not increasing the radiative force much. It doesn't mean that more energy is coming in from the sun is staying here. It basically means that the energy that was at ground level is moving up into the sky higher than where you were going to feel it or your crops are going to feel it. A second way besides the evapotranspiration, which is also very important in this regard, is surface roughness. When winds hit up against a forest, what it does is it pushes the winds up towards the air. And when that pushes the winds up toward the air, that actually pushes a lot of heat up into the sky with it. And it's, in fact, almost as important as evapotranspiration. It doesn't get to be talked about as much as the evapotranspiration. But all of this pushing of the heat up into the sky when the winds hit up against the forest is actually very important in terms of local and regional climates. And finally, there are a number of scientists who believe that wind creation, that the one important reason we have hurricanes, one important reason we have quite important winds that we would not have otherwise, is because essentially the forests are pulling in that wind. It's a term that's being used for that is a biotic pump of the trees pumping the wind towards it. It is very controversial. It's much more poorly understood than the evapotranspiration of the surface roughness. But it's increasingly talked about in the scientific literature. Next, please. And finally, the other main way that we are changing the climate that's not through carbon emissions or methane or carbon sequestration is through cloud condensation nuclear. Let's hear this video to explain what cloud condensation nuclear are. Next, please, Tony. But H2O can't form droplets on its own, ever. Much like the plants they nourish, raindrops grow from seeds. At the heart of every raindrop is a tiny impurity, anything from specks of dust to salt, pollen, even chemicals. Rain seeds give water molecules something to cling to so they can grow into droplets. Trillions of these droplets make up every cloud we see. And when they eventually get big enough and heavy enough, they fall. So that's rain. It's water collecting on little islands of floating sky junk and pixie dust. If you're like me, most of you probably thought that rain was just about how much water got into the sky and that when it got to a certain level it kind of... There was enough water there so that gravity made it fall. As you just saw in this video, that's not really true. For the water to fall, it has to interact with these cloud condensation nuclei. And it turns out that vegetation and changes in vegetation actually have a big influence on these cloud condensation nuclei and determine when it's going to rain and if it's going to rain, whether it's going to be big droplets that come all the way down to the bottom or if it's going to be tiny little droplets that basically dissipate before it even hits the ground. How do they do that? Because if you've ever been to a field that's recently been cloud, you know, an incredible amount of dust goes into the air. You know that a forest is being burned, is putting smoke into the air. These forests are putting a huge amount of microbes and pollen into the air. And all of these different land use changes, they're sending specks of things into the sky that are actually creating cloud condensation nuclei and determining will it rain more, will it rain less, when will it rain. And this is very important as well because perhaps the thing that we know about and understand least when it comes to the general processes of climate change is the role of clouds. Clouds have been very difficult to model in global climate change models. And for various reasons, they're very difficult to study at the global level. So this is an element here that is definitely influencing in significant ways cloud behavior. And we don't really understand that as well as we should. The next please. Now, what are some of these characteristics of these other pathways? What's different about the other climate change compared to the climate change that you're used to hearing about all the time in terms of global warming and greenhouse gas emissions? I would like to point three or four that I think are very important for policy. The first is that a lot of these processes are more local. It's not that you're changing the global climate. To a large extent, you're changing the local climate. And when I say local, I mean maybe 50 kilometers away from where the land use change goes on, maybe 100 kilometers. That's where the largest and most clearly evident effects are. And most of them tend to be a balance between the albedo effect on the one hand and the evapotranspiration and surface roughness effects on the other hand. On the albedo effect, generally speaking, deforesting an area is going to make it cooler. Why is it going to make it cooler? Because forests tend to be darker in color and so they absorb more light. If you exchange that by something lighter ground cover or by snow, if you deforest, it's going to get cooler. But on the other hand, these effects that we were talking about with evapotranspiration and surface roughness, if you deforest, it's going to get warmer. So what happens to the local temperature is really going to depend to a large extent on what is the balance between this albedo effect on the one hand and the evapotranspiration and surface roughness effects on the other hand. Now the fact that these are local effects is very important, but it doesn't mean that there are not also long distance and global impacts. When I deforest in a part of the Amazon, I can actually affect rainfall and temperature in California. I can affect it in other parts of the world. Do you have what they have, these long distance impacts? Still though, on the scientific level, we know very little about how large these long distance impacts are or very much about their direction or their trends. We do know they exist and it's one of the cutting edges of the scientific revolution. It's also important to say that when we think about the indicators of this other climate change, we're not so much focused on how much is average global temperature increasing. We're much more focused on how is the extreme temperatures increasing? How hot is it on the hottest hour of a day? How hot is it on the hottest day of the year? When does the rainy season start? How long is the dry season? A lot of climate indicators that are very important for people's lives, but are not the climate indicator that we're used to thinking of, which is just how much is the on average is the globe increasing in temperature. And I should also point out finally that many of these impacts at the local level are much larger than the greenhouse gas impacts, and certainly on the short term. So if you're feeling right now that it's much hotter than it was 15 or 20 years ago, particularly if you live in a tropical area, or if you're feeling that the rain is different than it was 20 years ago and you're living in a tropical area, it's quite likely that it's actually this other climate change that explains the difference in what you're feeling right now, more even than the climate change that you all are used to thinking about. Next please. Finally, in terms of the processes involved in this other climate change, just to be complete, I want to talk about one final process, which is called the biogenic volatile organic compounds. Now you're not going to be tested on this, you don't have to remember it, but it's worth knowing that there is this other thing out there called biogenic, volatile organic compounds. Now what are we talking about here? We're talking about hundreds and even thousands of different organic compounds that trees put into the atmosphere. Most of these, the biggest ones are called isopreens. You also have monoturpeans, but like I said, you have hundreds, even thousands of them. And they influence the climate in many ways as well that we're just beginning to understand. We'll have the video first and then we'll continue on. 95% of the Amazon's rain seeds are made by the trees and plants that live there. Along with water vapor, trees in the Amazon release chemicals that act as super sticky H2O magnets. These biogenic volatile organic compounds are how the forest makes its own rain. So that's one of the things that these biogenic volatile organic compounds do. They serve as cloud condensation, nuclear. They also have albedo of their own. They either reflect or absorb the sunlight. And they interact in very complex ways with greenhouse gas emissions. So when you have more biogenic volatile organic compounds in the air, it changes how quickly methane, how long, how quickly it interacts and disappears from its greenhouse gas effect. It affects the ozone composition in the atmosphere. It affects a lot of different chemicals in the atmosphere. So it's having an indirect effect that makes it a little bit like a greenhouse gas, but not quite a greenhouse gas. And these biogenic volatile organic compounds are also affecting your temperature, also affecting rainfall, and they're affecting both the local and the global climate. The effects are local specific. They're poorly understood. Sometimes they're warming the climate. Sometimes they're cooling the climate complex. But you should know that this is one more reason why when they tell you that climate change is about greenhouse gas emissions or greenhouse gas things, you can raise your hand and say, no, but what about the biogenic volatile organic compounds? Next, please. Now, how does the climate change that most of you think about interact with the other climate change we're talking about here? In some cases, it reinforces it. In some places by deforesting an area or reforesting an area, it's actually going to increase the global warming effect or the local warming effect. So in addition to the effects of the global warming from greenhouse gas emissions, you're also getting effects from this other climate change. In other cases, it's going to offset it. So if you deforest in the Arctic, in Siberia, that's going to reduce the albedo. I'm sorry, it's going to increase the albedo. And when it increases the albedo, you're going to reduce the albedo. And when it reduces the albedo, you're going to get the sun coming in and much more snow. So it's going to cool. In any case, in some cases, you're going to strengthen the global warming effect. In some cases, you're going to reduce it. The interaction between these two climate systems are complex. They're non-linear. They're dynamic. So we can't simply say the other climate change, you just add it to the climate change you're all aware of. You can't simply say this other climate change just subtracted. But you can say that it is quite significantly affecting the way the global warming you have all been hearing about is affecting people on the ground. And it's affecting them in many ways that are not just about this average global temperature, that's about the specifics of each location of each local climate. Next, please. Now I'm going to go slow here. This is probably the most complicated graph I'm going to show in this presentation, but it's an important one because one of the things that people often ask is, all right, how does this other climate change compare in size to the climate change that we've been hearing about, particularly if we're talking about average global temperature? It's very hard to compare the two globally with anything except average global temperature because things are so location specific. Now this is an exercise that is done by modeling. And basically what this graph is showing you, what we have here are different latitudes of the earth. So when you get the higher up there, 70, 80, 60, 70, 50, 60, that's Siberia, that's Canada, that's the Arctic. Then you get the 50s, the 30s, the 40s, that's Europe, that's the United States. Then you get the tropics. And then when you get on the bottom there, what you get that you start getting the Antarctica, the Sardinian Coal and these sort of things. Now this is a thought experiment that says what would happen if we deforested all of the trees in the 10 degree latitude for each of these 10 degrees? And if we start from the left, what is it showing us? It's showing us that this albedo effect, this orange effect, is very, very high in Siberia and the Arctic and the Northern Hemisphere. If we get way, way up there, the fact that you are removing trees and those trees are going to be replaced by snow, that snow is going to reflect a lot more sunlight back into the atmosphere. And so deforestation in these very, very Northern areas, it's going to be causing global cooling, if you will. More deforested, more cooling. But when you get down to the, then when you get to the United States or Europe, you see that those things are more or less similar. The thing that cools everything to the left of this line is cooling, everything to the right of this line is warming. So you're seeing when we get down to the middle of this thing, more things to the right of the line. So that means when you deforest, you're getting a lot more warming. And why are you getting that warming? If we look at the middle graph here, you're getting it because of the CO2 effect. The blue in the middle column of this graph is carbon dioxide. So we're saying that most of that is the global warming part that you've heard about, the greenhouse gas emissions, that blue is larger than the biophysical part than the other climate change. But even so, when we talk about the tropics in the tropical areas, about 25 or 30% of the global warming when you deforest an area in the tropics is coming from the other climate change, is coming from the evapotransportation, from the surface roughness, from these sort of things. And the other thing that if we get to the right side, the right column here, and we see that the right column is about how do these things add up? Are we talking about net cooling or net warming? What we see is that above about 50 degrees latitude, deforesting actually leads to net cooling. But when we get down to the tropics from roughly 10 degrees north to 20 degrees south, deforestation is going to lead to quite substantial net warming globally. And that net warming of deforestation is about a half a degree. So if we were to deforest the tropics, these areas here from zero to 10, that latitude, that would increase the global temperature by about one half of a degree centigrade. If we think about the difference between 1.5 degrees centigrade and two degrees centigrade, that's quite a big impact in terms of the global climate. Next please. So what does this mean at the local level in terms of temperatures? What this graph is, it's from a literature review that is showing different studies based some on empirical evidence, some on modeling with parameters that have been taken from other things. If we deforest an area, how much does the local temperature go up? And what we can see immediately from this graph is that it's going to go up much more in the tropics than in the boreal area, and that the temperate area is somewhat in between there. We can also see here that the closer we are to the ground, the temperature is going to grow up more. Why is that? That's because this process of the evapotranspiration and the surface rushness pushing the temperature into the sky. So anything that's closer to the ground is going to, the temperature is going to raise even more. How much more? Empirical studies are going to say in the tropics we're talking about roughly on average 1 degree, but in some places more than 2 degrees. So if we think about talking about 2 degrees increase in global warming, well in fact we've already got more than 2 degrees increase in temperature in many of the tropical areas just from this other climate change in deforestation. And it's not just the average temperature. The temperatures are going up more during the day than in the night. They're going up more during the hot season than in the dry season. And we're certainly getting this very clearly in the empirical studies. The modeling studies are a little bit less clear. Next please. What are some of the practical effects of all of this? Particularly in the tropics we're seeing real examples of lower crop yields, lower crop yields in soy and maize and the Brazilian Amazon, particularly the southern Brazilian Amazon. We're seeing real evidence that they're going to be a lot of local areas in the tropics where it's going to be very hard for agricultural workers to be working outside because it's just going to be too hot for them to work because of these local effects of deforestation on people's health. And we also see this phenomena of the urban heat islands. If you look at an urban area right now, many urban areas are 3 to 10 degrees centigrade, a huge amount hotter than rural areas that are relatively nearby. Why is that? That's because on the albedo side a lot of sunlight is being absorbed by these black roads, by all of these dark buildings. And it's because the lack of trees is limiting the evapotranspiration. So one thing that we can do to cool down the areas of urban areas is to put in a lot of trees and to make as many surfaces lighter as we possibly can. Next please. What does this mean in terms of rainfall? We see that on average deforestation is going to reduce rainfall because you're getting a lot less evapotranspiration. So the rain is not going into the sky. It means that we have to start asking questions about flying rivers and precipitation sheds. That's rain that's coming from forest in one location but then the winds are moving it to another location. The clouds are moving over the sky and those clouds are moving to someplace else where it's going to fall. If you remove those forests the place where they're going to get the rain from those clouds is going to get less rain. The deforestation is affecting your cloud condensation nuclei which we also talked about and all of this is significantly changing your rainfall averages but it's also changing your rainfall pattern when the rain starts, how long the dry season is. Generally speaking on average more deforestation means less rain but it's not just mechanical, it's not just linear. It depends on the scale particularly when we get to very larger areas of deforestation, the rain drops precipitously and it depends on the location. Where exactly are we talking about and where does the water from any particular place come from and it has both local and distance effects. Next please. So these changes in rainfall, what does it mean if you're a soybean grower in Brazil? It means more forests are getting clear, that deforestation is leading to climate change, that climate change means hotter local areas and less rain and so we're getting lower yields for your soybeans, we're getting less water supply in many areas, and we're getting much greater uncertainty in terms of knowing how much our crops are going to produce this year. Next please. A lot of you have been hearing lately about the Amazon tipping point, the fact that once you get to a certain level of deforestation the Amazon forest could disappear permanently and completely at least in the southern half of the Amazon basin. What many of you probably don't realize is that that tipping point is a result not only of the climate change that you're mostly familiar with, it's also a result of this other climate change. Tree loss leading to less evaporation, leading to decreased rainfall, leading to longer dry seasons, less humidity, more fires and greater tree loss. So this feedback loop where you're just getting more and more of this going around in circles, getting constantly worse leads to a point where eventually you reach a tipping point where what used to be rain or rainforest permanently becomes savanna, grasslands. That's the result of the global warming combined with this local warming and local drying, and if this happens in the entire southern Amazon, which is possible today, it could very well affect major regional climate patterns, global climate patterns, and certainly biodiversity. Next please. So what are the policy implications of all of this? And I've already talked for about 40 minutes, so I'm almost near the end here. The first thing is that when we add the other climate change to the climate change that most people have been talking about, forests become much more important because all of the things that I've just talked about, everything is added on to the questions of carbon. So it's not just about carbon, it's about carbon plus all of these different things. Another thing which is important from a policy perspective is that many of these effects occur almost immediately. This is not the gradual increase of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere over decades. If I cut the tree down today, it will stop evaporating today and it will affect rainfall almost immediately. And so the time periods we're talking about are much more easier, closer to home, and many of the things we're talking about have to do with people's lived experience. It's not just a question of this vague thing about the world is warming, the general atmosphere. This is, it's getting hotter here because something that happened near me affected the climate that I'm experiencing as a farmer, that I'm experiencing as a city that needs water, that I'm experiencing as a worker who feels very hot when it goes out to work. Next please. So as I just said, the policy interventions here can also be more local. If we want to cool down the cities so that people don't feel heat stress and there are many cities in the tropics where there will be practically unlivable if we don't address the urban heat island effect in South Asia, in parts of Africa. We're going to need those trees to act as massive air conditioners for people's health and for the city's water. And we're going to need local forests to address the issues of agricultural yields and heat stress. If we're thinking about a place like Mato Grosso, if we're thinking about place like Southern Pará, if we're thinking about a place of Rio and Sumatra, we're going to have to be thinking about how much forest do we need locally to maintain the climate that we need for our workers and for our crops. Next please. One interesting question that's hard to figure out what to deal with is should we call this climate mitigation or climate adaptation? One thing I haven't said but it's important is the first time that the global community really started addressing this whole issue of the other climate change in any systematic way is the IPCC land report of 2019. The special report on climate change and land. And there was a big debate among the people working on the IPCC report, should all of this go under mitigation or adaptation? I tend to think about this as mitigation because if you stop deforesting, you're going to have less climate change from my perspective. But if your definition of climate change is that it's only climate change, if it's created by greenhouse gas emissions, then it's useful to think about this in terms of adaptation. Is this something that, all right, we're going to have this amount of greenhouse gas emissions, but we can reduce the effects on people by changing the amounts of forest and the way they affect local temperature and the way they affect rainfall. What does this imply about which international agencies address this? Obviously, it doesn't really fit into reduced emissions from deforestation and degradation red because precisely the definition of this other climate change is that it's not about emissions. Does it fit into the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change? Maybe not really. As we said, the UN Convention was set up to deal with climate change that resulted from greenhouse gas emissions, not all these other climate changes that are resulting from reforestation or deforestation. But there is an element of adaptation in the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change where this could enter in. And it might be a good thing to think about how it fits into the Jeff Adaptation Fund if we're thinking about where does this fit in from a policy perspective. Next, please. Another very important thing from a political perspective is that this climate change is less global, is less north-south. This is not, I'm going to reduce my emissions to help the climate. This is, I'm going to reduce my emissions to help me. If I, I'm sorry, this is about I'm going to reduce my deforestation to help me. I'm going to reduce climate change to help me. If I'm deforesting in the Amazon basin, I am having an impact on my own farmers, on my own soybean yields, on my own workers. So the political dynamic is different. And the transborder regional climate effects become very important as well. So we see here some of these arrows. These are some of these flying rivers where the rainfall in parts of the southern cone of South America, much of that rainfall is coming from the forest in the Amazon basin, where we see that in Africa, that much of the rainfall from the Sahel is actually coming from the Congo basin. And amazingly enough, we see that some of the rainfall in Northern China is coming from Europe. So these transboundary effects create a transboundary discussion, which is quite different from the global discussion that we've been having. And just one thing I forgot to say, but it's worth mentioning is that there's a study that came out just in the last couple of weeks. It says that the average impact of the reduction in rainfall from deforestation in the Amazon basin on soybean and beef producers over the next 20 or 30 years is going to be over a billion dollars a year of lost crop production just because of reduced rainfall. Next please. So finally, to the end here, where does this all leave us? The first thing is to say we are on the cutting edge of science. Many of the things that I've said today, you couldn't have said just 10 years ago. Many of the things I've talked about, there's still a lot of the specifics or the magnitudes or the details that we don't know. What we do know is that this is significant, that it's substantial, that it's not detail. And we do know that it is increasing the uncertainty in the climate system. And we know that in general in the economy, greater uncertainty means greater economic costs. A farmer who doesn't know how much it's going to rain is going to find it much more difficult to know when to plant or how much to plant or what to plant. And that works its way through in the entire system. So if there's any message I want you to take away today, it's yes, this is complicated, but this other climate change is real, it's big, and people concerned with forest and forest policy cannot continue to ignore it. Thank you very much. Thank you, David. That was inspiring. I think there's already some questions in the chat. Maybe you want to take those and then we'll just ask people to raise their hands if they have any further questions. But David, perhaps you take a look at what's in the chat and then I'll see who might have a hand raised. And there's a question here about Mongolia on the 46 Norths. So to the grass, reducing deforestation in Mongolia will not have much impact on global warming. Now I'm wondering, does this also consider permaforest melting? I'm almost sure that it does not consider permaforest melting. It only considers above ground effects. So it's not dealing with the peat effects. And I think that's a very important point. Another very important point in terms of the higher latitudes is that this effect of albedo and the higher latitudes may be a temporary effect. Because as these higher latitudes get warmer anyway, that snow is going to disappear. And that process is unfortunately going to disappear. So as the Arctic increases, the difference between a forest and a snow covered area, that albedo difference is going to be reducing over time. So that's something to consider. But it does tell you that if we're worried about this other climate change issue, it's very important to focus very specifically on the tropics because that's where the real action in these issues is going on. Irrigation in India may impact rainfall in Africa. Yes, there is some relevant research on that. I'm trying to get my cursor to work here, sorry. Can you read me the next question? Because I can't, for some reason, I can't get my cursor to work. To what extent were emissions from soils falling deforestation included in the Latino grants? I think I've already answered that. I don't think they were. And just one thing I should say to people the latitudinal graphs and the graphs in terms of local temperature are from two manuscripts that are not yet published and so cannot yet be widely shared. But I did think it was important for you all to be aware of that. Says, I realized that what I've heard about this before is not from scientists but from local community members in Uganda, Kenya, India and other places based on their experiences of changing local climates. I would say yes, in many ways, certainly what we're finding out is that science is catching up with traditional knowledge. Traditional knowledge is said for a long time that local changes in vegetation can have significant impact effects on the climate. That used to be considered an old wives tale. There's lots of peer-reviewed literature now that says that is not an old wives tale. It's not just the rainforest of the southern Amazon that's sensitive to civilization but also the western Amazon. Yes, that's true but it's the southern Amazon where this process is moving faster and it is likely to have an impact in a shorter time period. What is the interactions with rising water, sea temperatures? With rising water, sea temperatures, there's a relatively limited interaction, I believe. But there is a significant interaction in the seas more generally. One of the reasons that the empirical studies and the modeling studies often don't coincide that well is because when you start modeling significant major areas of deforestation, you start to get a lot of interactions with the oceans that don't show up yet in empirical studies. That's one of the areas that we know relatively little about. So does it have a lot to do with rising water? Not per se but there is very important feedbacks from the oceans into this. It's not just the terrestrial process. What would be your practical advice to forestry practitioners in transforming forestry of different latitudes? One is I think that we really need to get to the cutting edge in terms of being able to understand and manage these processes better so that in the future I'm convinced that we will be able to manage local land use in part for local temperature. Right now we're mostly there only in terms of urban forestry and knowing what we need to do to reduce urban heat islands but we do know that in general for example in the southern Amazon keeping a fair amount of forest there is going to be good for the temperature and for the rainfall of the soybean farmers and the maize farmers near that. I think we're going to find an increasing number of examples like that. It means also that we should be thinking often about albedo, what species are we planning and how much different species reflect into the sky. It means that we should stop saying that 10% of climate change is caused by deforestation and we should go out and make the argument for more funding, more emphasis on forests in this climate discussion because deforestation is having a much larger effect and reforestation could have a much larger effect than what most of our non-forestry colleagues are aware of. How do you see that scientific knowledge can be combined with local and traditional knowledge in order to influence policy and practice? Well I'll give a very interesting example from my own experience which was in Nicaragua in the 1980s we did lots of oral histories with farmers and the farmers all said at the time that rainfall was decreasing and we said no that's impossible. We've been looking at all of our rainfall meters for the last 20 years and this area in Nicaragua rainfall has not been decreasing. In fact it's been the same but when we started to look at the system more carefully what it turned out was that the rainfall patterns had changed and the planting dates had changed and so even though you had the same amount of rainfall people were getting less moisture for their crops and so the farmers' perception that they were getting a lot less moisture in their system was real even though it wasn't for the reason that they thought it was. We need to have a lot more dialogues and we need to be looking at these systems much closer up to get a sense of that and that's all the questions we have in the chat. I don't know if we have questions from the audience that anybody wants to raise their hand or add questions to the chat. I haven't seen any hands so far but I would encourage everybody to do so and David just to be the devil's advocate here when we sort of looked at the graph that you showed us it also showed us that if we deforest in the boreal zone we could reduce global warming with half a degree so what's your answer going to be to those that are saying well that's the quickest way that we can make sure that we reduce the increase if you will in global warming. We should simply deforest all of the forests in the boreal zone. First I would say it didn't show it would be a half a degree it's much less than a half a degree it's a much smaller amount but it is you would in the short term cool things down a bit. One of the problems is the one that I already mentioned which is that most of that impact is coming because of the great contrast between the snow and the forest. As the world warms unfortunately a lot of that snow is not going to be there and that contrast is not going to be there so it's a somewhat short term effect that you're going to get it's not a long term solution by any means and the one of the other things that was answered from a lot of the people in the chat was that doesn't include all of the the permafrost issues and the huge amount of methane that would come out of from the system if you opened it up and finally I should say that that is the impact on global temperatures but the impact on local temperatures could very well be different not only in terms of the average local temperatures but in terms particularly of the extreme temperatures so it could be that the hottest day of the year again the hottest hour of the day it's actually getting quite warmer when you deforest in the boreal area it's not getting cooler yeah what impact it might have on the thawing of the permafrost if you were to either increase or decrease the forest in the boreal zone and I think that is part of the missing picture that we have at the moment we know that temperatures are rising faster in the Arctic and having a bigger effect there than they are elsewhere but that interplay between forest snow thawing of the permafrost I don't think we we have a good enough picture of yet but it would be interesting to see that I think that's right David I know that there are a couple of the slides that you don't want to share simply because it's in unpublished literature so far but it would be really good if you could take those out and then we could share the rest of the presentation and as well any links that you have to further information because for a couple of the slides it will be difficult to understand without your voice over so but there are some some specific studies that I think would be really useful for people to be able to dive into to get a little bit more I'd be happy if you can share that that would be great I'd be happy to share those things and we can we can figure out what the best way to do that is like I said I know that I was forced to go over this stuff very fast it is very complex I'm sure other people could explain it better than me I only hope that I've wet people's appetite to think that maybe there's something here that I hadn't thought about before David I see a couple of hands but I also I saw something in the chat about combining traditional knowledge and scientific knowledge and there's a couple coming in but I see Ben and then Safia Ben yes thank you David and thank you for for calling me that's it yeah it was a fascinating presentation David and I really appreciated you giving it so thanks for this overview um other than the the somewhat dissonant note that that's a highlighted discuss I did mostly get the get the feeling that that these kinds of issues that you highlighted reinforce the type of work that we're already doing so perhaps it would be it would be helpful at least to me to understand what's the nuance or what's the the subtle difference what should we be doing different now with this emerging knowledge that's coming out from what we're already doing what's the what's the change or what's the difference that we should be thinking about or should put in the back of our mind or or what new information should we be looking forward to coming out so that we understand the the different actions that would be that would be called for under this new paradigm shift you're highlighting thanks well let me give you a very specific example in the last month the minister of environment of brazil has come out and said I need a billion dollars from the United States to reduce deforestation in brazil because I don't need to be reducing deforestation reducing growth and economic develop in my own country for the sake of the rest of the world what's in it for me well just two weeks later a study came out that says that brazil is losing one billion dollars a year in soy yields and beef fields because of the lower rainfall not even including the higher temperatures the lower rainfall in the southern amazon now that one billion dollars a year that brazil is losing because of lower soybean rates because of its deforestation has nothing to do with the united states the political the political economy of that is totally different and it's a huge amount of money so brazil doesn't have to do this for the rest of the world brazil has to do this for the brazil because the southern amazon based in the serrado of brazil is one of the most important agricultural areas of the world and we're putting that at risk for brazil not for the rest of the world if we don't address the deforestation issue so that's just one example another example is as i said each time we repeat this thing that net emissions are 10 percent that that net deforestation that net deforestation is 10 percent of carbon emissions we are really selling ourselves short in the climate discussion we're selling ourselves short because of the net part because we shouldn't be taking away the reforestation from the deforestation we should be looking at the importance of forest is the sum of those two things but we're also selling ourselves short because in addition to those carbon emissions there's this whole very significant climate change that's going on that's directly related to forest so addressing these forest issues becomes much more important and obviously i'm preaching to the converted here but i would say that the converted here has been really shooting itself in at the foot constantly by ignoring this issue because this is a very strong argument for greater support for the work that you all have been doing thanks David um who's next or sorry sapphya my internet is a bit a iffy at the moment but sapphya was next yeah thank you david for the interesting presentation i had a quick question about um the existing research if it's showing any difference in other climate change factors for plantations versus natural forests mixed natural forests um i would say in general not much in general we're finding now this is an oversimplification you can't find specifics but the general story is that um that they're somewhat similar now obviously if you have a huge tree that's pumping out a huge amount of water and you compare that with a sapling next door um in terms of the the size etc you're going to get a very different effect but that's not because it's a natural forest or a plantation it's mostly because of the plantations are very young and very and and you would guess that the the shorter term plantations have had much lower effects but generally speaking what i've seen is that it's surprisingly symmetrical um there is a question here to your knowledge to lulcf negotiations under the unfcc and discussions in the european union not address these aspects of land use change no they do not address these aspects of land use change albedo has been to some extent in the discussion um just because it's a large impact in terms of global warming in terms of average global temperature but these questions of evapotranspiration and surface roughness and biogenic volatile organic compounds um and cloud condensation nuclei have been almost entirely absent from the negotiations there hasn't even been a forum for analyzing what their effects are and what their results are and unfortunately if we look at the ipcc report of 2019 it does a pretty good job of summarizing the science and it's if you want to see it a good place to kind of start is the pieces of chapter two of that report that focus on it but it does a very poor job of pulling out the policy implications of this what does it mean for the real world it's just kind of put in as a scientific background unfortunately and one of the reasons why i'm emphasizing this so much is that has been totally absent up until that in the policy discussions thanks okay i'd also just ask attorney or sophie to to save the chat that we have because there's a lot of links in there as well to additional information that we should capture so that we can share that as well um i don't see any other hands at the moment i see a couple of new messages david um i see i see lots of maybe there are mostly comments they see more comments than questions right um says well eucalyptus is well known for consuming large quantities of water which ought to be good in certain scenarios here um that that sounds like an interesting comment but i haven't seen any specific studies that are on the topic that i could speak to in fact i would say i've seen relatively few studies of this that are species specific um in part because most of this is is dealing with um most of a lot of it is done through remote sensing and flux towers of mixed forests but but the species the species specific questions are relevant and it certainly would be a very important area to look at more i haven't seen a lot of i i've looked a fair amount at the literature and there isn't a lot of literature on the species on species specific at least that's framing it within this context okay i think that's it for the questions david i thank you so much for an inspiring talk i'm sorry i have to take my video off again because of the network here it has been really a revelation to many of us many of the links that you have provided here as well to what is happening outside of the carbon flux if you will uh so i oh there was just one more question at the end here can you see that um yes and let me just say i'm very sorry for such a dense presentation i usually don't give such dense presentations and even worse a dense presentation about a topic that i'm sharing with you second hand hopefully the um the advantages outweigh the disadvantages but i do appreciate people's patience could you link positive impacts of these other climate changes with specific nature based solutions for different parts of the world um yeah i mean what we're talking about is that generally speaking in the tropics and and i will say that there is there is a definite bias in my understanding of the literature and in my focus on the policies towards the tropics and that's why some of the questions are the boreal areas and those sort of things i i i track less closely but in the tropics the basic story here is that overall forests are going to be much more important in a positive way for climate change than if we look just at the emissions side and that that goes together with the biodiversity aspects that goes together with the um livelihoods aspects um that goes together with the watershed environmental so essentially what we're saying here is that we have another set of environmental services we're used to saying all right we have environmental services on carbon we have environmental services on biodiversity we have environmental concerns services on watershed we have consumption products and timber products well we actually have this whole other set of environmental services which is this other climate change which at least in the tropics is providing pretty generic positive benefits for increasing our treatment thank you we have marieka with the question yeah thank you very much david so paul's question inspired me for a very last question sorry to all for lengthening um so so yeah currently the the green climate fund provides like a bonus to countries that submit work plus results and they can indicate that they have non-carbon benefits so i was curious like do you see in the future based on on the graph that you were showing uh some kind of incentive system where these like the non-carbon benefits that you mentioned could like countries that are near the zero latitude would get a higher um incentive than countries that are at at higher latitudes or would that be too generic like our country's circumstances too different to put some kind of incentive system in place just merely on on the latitude um it is an interesting idea one thing i would say is that if you were going for that sort of incentive system and it may make sense to do it you probably wouldn't just want to use latitude the you can make similar things along longitude um you can make similar things along elevation and you can make similar things in terms of how hot how dry or how wet the crop climate is so i just showed the latitude um variable but there's three or four other variables you might also think about in terms of figuring out what that plus would be um for why the the trees are providing these extra benefits compared to other areas um another thing that i'll say is that when we started here five years ago on this to just give people a sense of how rapidly this was moving there essentially wasn't a single economic study of this out there um in the last year or two years there have been four or five important economic studies out there on brazil um and that's only because there's more research on brazil doesn't mean that you couldn't get similar results from the conga basin or similar results from other parts of the world so this is this is to some extent a kind of stay tuned because i do think we're going to get a lot of research in the next five years next ten years it's going to give us the sort of indicators the sort of financial values um the sort what we were able to say ten years ago is that there's a positive effect increasingly we're able to say that positive effect is this much and it means this much in terms in greater soil yields this much in terms of greater water and your municipal water system this much and greater worker labor productivity that's something that we couldn't have even thought about ten years ago so in terms of turning this into policy it's very much a rapidly fast moving target so the end of your speech stay tuned um we will certainly make sure that we help you stay tuned by sending the presentation out by sending some links to some more information on where you can get it and we will invite david in again when there is more to say so thank you so much david thank you to everybody who participated today with the questions the comments that were in i hope you enjoyed it as much as i did and stay tuned we will get back to you bye bye for now thank you