Editing IPCC:AR6/WGII/Cross-Chapter-Paper-7 (section)

== Frequently Asked Questions ==

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=== FAQ CCP7.1 | How is climate change affecting tropical forests and what can we do to protect and increase their resilience? ===

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''Global warming, droughts, extreme rainfalls and sea level rise cause significant impacts on tropical forests.''

In addition to climate change, tropical forests are experiencing non-climatic stressors. Conversion of forest into large-scale agriculture land and exploitation of timber and non-timber forest products are increasing pressure and amplifying the impacts of climate change on the remaining areas of tropical forests. These include biodiversity decline, increases of fires, large-scale ecosystem transformation (e.g., into savannah in southeastern Amazon) and increasing carbon emissions due to deforestation, forest conversion and forest degradation. Further, loss of forest resources leads to the decline of livelihoods of Indigenous Peoples and local communities. All nations need to collaborate to implement collective actions to protect tropical forests.

Tropical forests are essentially important for the health of planet Earth. Tropical forests in Asia, Africa and South America regulate carbon, water and chemical cycles, which maintain a healthy climate and nutrient cycles for supporting life. Tropical forests are home to two-thirds of our world’s biodiversity, although they cover only about 13% of the land on Earth, but it is not known exactly how many millions of living creatures, such as microorganisms, insects, amphibians, snakes, fish, birds, mammals and primates, live in tropical forests.

Approximately 1.3 billion people directly depend upon tropical forest resources to survive. Others are indirectly dependent upon the health and provisioning of ecosystem services and goods from tropical forests. The forests provide many kinds of economic products, such as timber, medicines and food, and recreational services, such as nature trekking, bird and wildlife watching, to mention a few. Indigenous People and other forest-dependent communities have shown extraordinary knowledge on how to manage forest resources to meet their subsistence needs without causing forest degradation. This forest culture and wisdom are broken when the rate of forest extraction changes into unplanned and unsustainable large-scale transformation.

Deforestation and land-use changes in tropical forests cause not only physical and biological changes on flora and fauna, but also rapid changes in cultures harming forest peoples. A degraded tropical forest is prone and more vulnerable to climate change. An increase in temperature in lowlands creates an unfavourable condition for optimum growths of many kinds of plant species which also affects several agricultural plants. Coffee farmers, for example, are forced to open new forest frontiers in highland areas to meet an optimum temperature for the growth of coffee.

The onset and duration of dry and rainy seasons also changes. A prolonged wet season has excessive rains which cause flash floods and substantially disturbs the fruiting cycle of many plant species. Due to high rainfall and high humidity, most flowers of forest trees fail to mature, and hence essentially deplete fruit production. Most trees in tropical forests require a short period of a dry season to have a mass fruiting season. On the other hand, a prolonged dry season causes soils to dry in deeper layers, higher atmospheric demand for water vapour and enhanced forest fires. In the tropical humid forests, the majority of forest fires are anthropogenic. In Southeast Asia, peat fires cause large carbon emissions and haze pollution which harms locals and people in neighbouring countries. The impact on tropical forest comes also from the sea level rise which is due to changes in salinity and sedimentation rates, and the expansion of inundated areas leads to the decline of mangrove productivity.

Projected impacts of climate change on the tropical forest might be detrimental to safeguards of local communities and a significant number of flora and fauna in the tropics. In southeastern Amazon, reduction in precipitation, due to changes in the climate pattern, associated with intense deforestation and land cover change are leading to reduction of productivity in the remaining forest areas, and might lead to a large-scale change in the forest structure which can become a savannah. In Southeast Asia, in particular in Indonesia and Malaysia, prolonged dry seasons associated with the El Niño phenomenon cause extensive peat fires, releasing large amounts of carbon dioxide and creating various health problems related to haze pollution. Furthermore, climate change interacts with deforestation for agriculture (crops, livestock and plantation forestry), logging, mining or infrastructure development, exacerbating temperature and rainfall changes resulting in more degradation.

Climate change, together with forest fragmentation and deforestation, also harms wildlife. For example, the orangutan, an endemic species to tropical peat forests in Kalimantan and Sumatra, is classified as critically endangered. Many other endemic and unknown species of flora in tropical forests are in the same condition and could experience a mass extinction at a more rapid rate than the previous five mass extinctions on Earth. About 1.3 million Indigenous Peoples depending on the natural resources of the tropical forest would suffer from cultural disruption and livelihood change due to forest loss.

To protect tropical forests a collective action of all nations is needed. It requires a global effort to stop deforestation and the conversion of tropical forests. The role of Indigenous Peoples and local communities as forest keepers must be strengthened. Economic incentives for protecting tropical forests, among other strategies, could facilitate collective actions towards a sustainable management of tropical forests. Sustainable, effective and just strategies to increase the resilience of tropical forests need to consider the complex political, social and economic dynamics involved, including the goals, identity and livelihood priorities of Indigenous Peoples and local communities beyond natural resource management. Strategies can benefit from integrating knowledge and know-how from traditional cultures, fostering transitions towards more sustainable systems.

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Box FAQ CCP7.1

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