Projected Impacts of Bioenergy-Demand-Induced Land Use and Cover Changes on Regional Climate in Central Europe

Abstract EN

Energy shortfalls are becoming more and more serious all over the world, and worldwide governments have tried to promote the development of biofuels in order to mitigate the climatic impacts of massive fossil fuel consumption.

Since the land is the main input factor of the bioenergy production, the development of biofuels will inevitably lead to change of the land use structure and allocation and thereby affect the climate system.

With Central Europe as the study area, this study explored the impacts of land use/land cover change (LUCC) on climate under the influence of demand of bioenergy production for land resources.

First, the land use structure from 2010 to 2050 is simulated with the Agriculture and Land Use model in MiniCam.

The result indicates that the main conversion will be mainly from grassland and forest to cropland and from cropland to grassland.

Then the Dynamics of Land System model was used to spatially simulate the LUCC in the future.

The impacts of LUCC on the climate were analyzed on the basis of simulation with the Weather Research and Forecasting (WRF) model.

The climate change will be characterized by the increase of latent heat flux and temperature and the decrease of precipitation.