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Factors affecting Earth's climate can be broken down into forcings, feedbacks and internal variations. [14]: 7 Four main lines of evidence support the dominant role of human activities in recent climate change: [17]
Almost no other ecosystem is as vulnerable to climate change as coral reefs. Updated 2022 estimates show that even at a global average increase of 1.5 °C (2.7 °F) over pre-industrial temperatures, only 0.2% of the world's coral reefs would still be able to withstand marine heatwaves , as opposed to 84% being able to do so now, with the figure ...
External factors, also called state factors, control the overall structure of an ecosystem and the way things work within it, but are not themselves influenced by the ecosystem. On broad geographic scales, climate is the factor that "most strongly determines ecosystem processes and structure".
A related phenomenon driven by climate change is woody plant encroachment, affecting up to 500 million hectares globally. [218] Climate change has contributed to the expansion of drier climate zones, such as the expansion of deserts in the subtropics. [219] The size and speed of global warming is making abrupt changes in ecosystems more likely ...
Whole ecosystem disruptions will occur earlier under more intense climate change: under the high-emissions RCP8.5 scenario, ecosystems in the tropical oceans would be the first to experience abrupt disruption before 2030, with tropical forests and polar environments following by 2050. In total, 15% of ecological assemblages would have over 20% ...
Ecosystem-based Adaptation (EbA) describes a variety of approaches for adapting to climate change, all of which involve the management of ecosystems to reduce the vulnerability of human communities to the impacts of climate change such as storm and flood damage to physical assets, coastal erosion, salinisation of freshwater resources, and loss of agricultural productivity.
The five components of the climate system all interact. They are the atmosphere, the hydrosphere, the cryosphere, the lithosphere and the biosphere. [1]: 1451 Earth's climate system is a complex system with five interacting components: the atmosphere (air), the hydrosphere (water), the cryosphere (ice and permafrost), the lithosphere (earth's upper rocky layer) and the biosphere (living things).
Since future climate is likely to be different from the present climate, developing adaptive capacity is a prerequisite for the adaptation that can reduce the potential negative effects of exposure to climate change. In climate change, adaptive capacity, along with hazard, exposure and vulnerability, is a key component that contributes to risk ...