Albedo can dominate land change's global temperature effect

An open Nature Communications study published October 3 used Earth-system models to separate radiative and non-radiative effects of land-surface change. It finds that the globally integrated temperature response scales nearly linearly with the shift in planetary albedo caused by land change. Non-radiative effects such as evapotranspiration, turbulence and surface roughness drive many local temperature differences but largely cancel at global scale. This helps distinguish local impacts from the global climate consequences of afforestation, deforestation or crop conversion. The result comes from model experiments; it does not mean every region changes in the same direction or magnitude, and albedo cannot be the sole land-policy metric.