The importance of 1.5°C warming for the Great Barrier Reef.

Autor: McWhorter JK; Marine Spatial Ecology Lab, School of Biological Sciences & ARC Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies, University of Queensland, St Lucia, Queensland, Australia.; College of Life and Environmental Sciences, University of Exeter, Exeter, UK., Halloran PR; College of Life and Environmental Sciences, University of Exeter, Exeter, UK., Roff G; Marine Spatial Ecology Lab, School of Biological Sciences & ARC Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies, University of Queensland, St Lucia, Queensland, Australia., Skirving WJ; Coral Reef Watch, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, Washington, District of Columbia, USA.; ReefSense Pty Ltd, Townsville, Queensland, Australia., Perry CT; College of Life and Environmental Sciences, University of Exeter, Exeter, UK., Mumby PJ; Marine Spatial Ecology Lab, School of Biological Sciences & ARC Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies, University of Queensland, St Lucia, Queensland, Australia.
Jazyk: angličtina
Zdroj: Global change biology [Glob Chang Biol] 2022 Feb; Vol. 28 (4), pp. 1332-1341. Date of Electronic Publication: 2021 Nov 25.
DOI: 10.1111/gcb.15994
Abstrakt: Tropical coral reefs are among the most sensitive ecosystems to climate change and will benefit from the more ambitious aims of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change's Paris Agreement, which proposed to limit global warming to 1.5° rather than 2°C above pre-industrial levels. Only in the latest Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change focussed assessment, the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project phase 6 (CMIP6), have climate models been used to investigate the 1.5° warming scenario directly. Here, we combine the most recent model updates from CMIP6 with a semi-dynamic downscaling to evaluate the difference between the 1.5 and 2°C global warming targets on coral thermal stress metrics for the Great Barrier Reef (GBR). By ~2080, severe bleaching events are expected to occur annually under intensifying emissions (shared socioeconomic pathway SSP5-8.5). Adherence to 2° warming (SSP1-2.6) halves this frequency but the main benefit of confining warming to 1.5° (SSP1-1.9) is that bleaching events are reduced further to 3 events per decade. Attaining low emissions of 1.5° is also paramount to prevent the mean magnitude of thermal stress from stabilizing close to a critical thermal threshold (8 Degree Heating Weeks). Thermal stress under the more pessimistic pathways SSP3-7.0 and SSP5-8.5 is three to fourfold higher than the present day, with grave implications for future reef ecosystem health. As global warming continues, our projections also indicate more regional warming in the central and southern GBR than the far north and northern GBR.
(© 2021 The Authors. Global Change Biology published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.)
Databáze: MEDLINE
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