Az egyre növekvő energiafelhasználás, világnépesség és éhezés olyan, több évtizede megoldatlan problémák, amelyeket a klímaváltozás és az ez által kialakult szélsőséges időjárási viszonyok tovább súlyosbítottak, a napjainkban tapasztalható gazdasági válság pedig még inkább megnehezítheti megoldásukat.A megújítható energiaforrások szerepének növelésében katalizátorszerepet betöltő Európai Unió már a 80-as évek elején megoldást keresett a túltermelés következtében felhalmozódott szántóföldi termékek felhasználására.

As in many other developing countries, cities in Bangladesh have witnessed rapid urbanization, resulting in increasing amounts of land being taken over and therefore land cover changing at a faster rate. Until now, however, few efforts have been made to document the impact of land use and land cover changes on the climate, environment, and ecosystem of the country because of a lack of geospatial data and time-series information.

The abandonment of traditional rural life in mountain areas has favoured the expansion of forest in the headwaters of Pyrenean rivers. In this paper, we (i) analyse hydro‐climatic trends at the annual and monthly scales in three nested sub‐catchments in a central Pyrenean basin and (ii) quantify the relative contribution of climate change and forest cover on the observed changes in runoff. Land use maps indicate an increase in the forest cover in all sub‐basins for the period 1987–2009.

Habitat loss and climate change pose a double jeopardy for many threatened taxa, making the identification of optimal habitat for the future a conservation priority. Using a case study of the endangered Bornean orang‐utan, we identify environmental refuges by integrating bioclimatic models with projected deforestation and oil‐palm agriculture suitability from the 1950s to 2080s. We coupled a maximum entropy algorithm with information on habitat needs to predict suitable habitat for the present day and 1950s.

Arid regions in Asia are commonly characterized by rapidly growing populations with limited land resources and varying rainfall frequencies under climatic change. Despite being one of the most important environmental challenges in Asia, the changing aridity in this region, particularly due to large-scale land cover change, has not been well documented. In this study, we used rainfall data and a new land heterogeneity index to identify recent trend in land cover changes in the Asian arid regions.

During recent decades, forests have expanded into new areas throughout the whole of Norway. The processes explained as causing the forest expansion have focused mainly on climate or land use changes. To enable a spatially explicit separation of the effects following these two main drivers behind forest expansion, the authors set out to model the potential for natural forest regeneration following land use abandonment, given the present climatic conditions.

Human-induced global climate change presents a unique and difficult challenge to the conservation of biodiversity. Despite increasing attention on global climate change, few studies have assessed the projected impacts of sea-level rise to threatened and endangered species. Therefore, we estimated the impacts of rising sea levels on the endangered Lower Keys marsh rabbit (Sylvilagus palustris hefneri) across its geographic distribution under scenarios of current conditions, low (0.3-m), medium (0.6-m), and high (0.9-m) sea-level rise.

Local and regional governments have developed climate action plans with significant implications for forests and wildlife. The effectiveness of climate mitigation through forest carbon sequestration depends on understanding the spatial and temporal dynamics of land-cover and land-use change (LCLUC). Few studies project future LCLUC effects on forest carbon sequestration, and even fewer examine the resulting consequences for forest connectivity and wildlife habitat.

For many of the world’s lakes, particularly those in remote regions, an assessment of the basin’s sensitivity to climate change is limited by the availability of appropriate hydrologic data. A regional steady-state lake water balance model was developed that uses simple, yet easily estimated or obtained, data to generate an aridity index (potential evapotranspiration to precipitation ratio) to predict changes in lake basin area to lake surface area ratio, a non-dimensional lake-basin property that can be easily obtained from digital maps.

Modern global temperature and land cover and projected future temperatures suggest that tropical forest species will be particularly sensitive to global warming. Given a moderate greenhouse gas emissions scenario, fully 75% of the tropical forests present in 2000 will experience mean annual temperatures in 2100 that are greater than the highest mean annual temperature that supports closed-canopy forest today. Temperature-sensitive species might extend their ranges to cool refuges, defined here as areas where temperatures projected for 2100 match 1960s temperatures in the modern range.

Most species face multiple anthropogenic disruptions. Few studies have quantified the cumulative influence of multiple threats on species of conservation concern, and far fewer have quantified the potential relative value of multiple conservation interventions in light of these threats.

When net deforestation declines in the tropics, attention will be drawn to the composition and structure of the retained, restored, invaded, and created forests. At that point, the seemingly inexorable trends toward increased intensities of exploitation and management will be recognized as having taken their tolls of biodiversity and other forest values.