CAFE: Climate Adaptation from Forest Ecosystems

Tropical deforestation causes local and regional climate change through altering the fluxes of water and energy between the surface and atmosphere (Spracklen et al., 2018; Ellison et al., 2017). Recent research has demonstrated that the local and regional warming and drying from tropical deforestation can match or even exceed that due to global climate change (Smith et al., 2023; Butt et al., in review). Reducing the rate of tropical deforestation can deliver local and regional climate co-benefits and provides a crucial climate adaptation option. However, methods to assess the regional climate impacts are complex and this acts as a major barrier for many stakeholders. Consequently the local and regional climate co-benefits of reduced deforestation are not well-recognised and are rarely accounted for by policy and decision makers. There is an urgent need for information on the local and regional climate co-benefits of reduced deforestation to be made easily accessible to a wide range of stakeholders. To address this problem, CAFE will develop, test and prototype the first interactive toolkit to allow a wide range of end users to assess the local and regional climate impacts of tropical deforestation and the climate co-benefits of reduced tropical deforestation. This new information will provide a strong lever to drive greater ambition for sustainable tropical land use at local, regional, and national scales with important benefits for society.