16 September 2019 - 17 September 2019
Austrian Research Centre for Forests (BWF), Vienna

APCC Special Report on land use, land management and climate change - Kick-off Meeting

IIASA contributes to the APCC Special Report which assembles experts from land-management, land-use including agriculture, forestry, geography, landscape, urban planning, and ecology as well as experts in national greenhouse gas reporting, land-use economics, and political and social sciences.

© Fritz Hiersche | Dreamstime

© Fritz Hiersche | Dreamstime

The Austrian Panel on Climate Change (APCC) Special Report on land use, land management and climate change will systematically assess the state of knowledge related to the multifaceted and highly integrated topics – with a regional focus on Austria. An open process that facilitates and builds upon contributions by the full community of Austrian researchers and experts active in the field of land-system research is pursued. The Special Report follows the quality criteria and standards of the APCC with respect to comprehensiveness, interdisciplinarity, and review quality.

Land use and the climate system are intricately linked. At the global level, land use is a key driver of climate change and, at the same time, directly affected by changes in climatic conditions. The scale and dynamics of global land use are associated with unprecedented sustainability challenges, such as maintaining food security, biodiversity loss and ecosystem degradation, with the potential to undermine the biophysical basis of human wellbeing. There is high confidence in the scientific community that climate change will exacerbate these challenges.

On the other hand, land ecosystems provide powerful means of climate change mitigation, e.g. by the ability of plants to sequester carbon. The development and implementation of land-based mitigation strategies will be relevant to enhance the probability of staying within 2° or even 1.5° warming thresholds. However, the large-scale implementation of land-based “net carbon dioxide removal“ strategies might further aggravate the existing challenges related to land use, due to emerging trade-offs associated with competition for land, land degradation or food security. These topics are covered in the upcoming APCC Special Report on land use, land management and climate change.

ESM deputy director and CLR Center Head Florian Kraxner will act as coordinating lead author of Chapter 5 Climate change mitigation: options of this APCC Special Report. Together with a delegation of ESM-CLR researchers, he will participate in the kick-off meeting in Vienna, initiating this two-year process. 

Text adapted from original proposal ©CCCA. 


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Last edited: 13 September 2019

CONTACT DETAILS

Florian Kraxner

Research Group Leader and Principal Research Scholar Agriculture, Forestry, and Ecosystem Services Research Group - Biodiversity and Natural Resources Program

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International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA)
Schlossplatz 1, A-2361 Laxenburg, Austria
Phone: (+43 2236) 807 0 Fax:(+43 2236) 71 313