In our age of spiralling climate concern, yet no sign of positive impact on observed climate heating, one barrier to effective action is that society does not currently perceive forests as climate infrastructure.
Urban planners already know they need reservoirs and a drainage system for water, an electricity grid for power, roads for transportation and parks for recreation. Many city planners have come to know of the benefit of having more trees for shade within urban areas, and to suck some pollutants out of the air. Currently, however, they don’t realise that cities can benefit from being adjacent to large forests, to benefit from their cloud-seeding and wind-generating effects. Discovering that a large forest can be important climate-modulating infrastructure, which could make hot cities more bearable, could transform the levels of support and finance for forest protection and regrowth.
Currently, most advocacy and policy on forest conservation operates within one of four concerns, or frames: first there are livelihoods, landscape preservation and tourism; second, there is watershed protection, third there is biodiversity protection; and fourth, more recently, carbon sequestration. All are important, but have typically been sidelined when big business wants to mine the land, farm massively, or expand a city. In our era of climate disturbance, those four reasons for forest conservation don’t generate the same political and psychological urgency as recognising the following truth: forests are part of the natural climate infrastructure that keeps regions cool enough to be habitable.
There is a substantial and growing scientific basis for that view. Forests alter evapotranspiration, atmospheric moisture, cloud formation, surface energy fluxes and rainfall. Key is the way that pollen and bacteria from large forests seed clouds, both above them, and far beyond, thereby adding to the Earth’s reflectivity. Another mechanism is called the biotic pump, where large forests can draw in air from oceans and send the moisture and heat into the atmosphere, also creating clouds.
Those processes combined seem to explain why, in tropical regions, deforestation has substantially disrupted regional rainfall and increased average and extreme temperatures. One example is Borneo, where prior to 2018, researchers “found a strong island-wide relationship between forest loss and increases in daily temperature and reductions in daily precipitation.” The cascading effects of deforestation in Borneo on more recent droughts and fires is clear, with a devastating loss of wild habitat and dangerous transboundary pollution.
Recent climate research is increasingly emphasizing these ‘biohydrological’ processes, rather than treating forests simply as carbon stores. Worryingly, and unacceptably, this aspect of anthropogenic climate change continues to be marginalised through a narrow focus on atmospheric carbon. If this is new to you, please see my previous two essays on the matter (on the basics, and on some implications). I also recommend the work of Dr Anastassia Makarieva.
As humanity is now a predominantly city-dwelling species, a key question within a heating world is not just whether some more tree-lined streets might help. It is whether some city-adjacent large natural forests could act as local and regional aircon systems. On this matter, there are various studies of cities in the tropics which indicate the cooling effects of forests, including studies which explain the specific processes involved in that, such as the generating of local winds. However, this subject has not yet received sufficient attention to document the process in policy-shaping detail. What would help is a comparative study of cities to identify differences in temperature averages and extremes in warm seasons. When adjusting for longitude, altitude, local typography, water body proximity, and urban size, such a study could provide valuable insight into the necessary size, proximity and maturity of a natural forest for it to seed clouds, drive winds, and transport heat. It is crucial work, and yet marginal to the mainstream climate agenda, and thus relatively underfunded.
Imagine if people and policy makers realised that large natural forests can be key for moderating excessive heat in their region? There could be a cascade of commitment to forest conservation around the world, involving city leadership, not just the national government departments focused on environment and land use. More people, in all walks of life, would begin to understand healthy ecosystems as key to maintaining their urban existence.
Imagine if a hot tropical city, such as Kuala Lumpur, decided to experiment with a reforestation project in its hinterland, and assess the results over the next 20 years? Currently, much of the land to the west of the city is palm plantation, which does not deliver any of the cloud-seeding effects of a mature natural forest. Yet there are patches of official forest reserves, which could be connected, assisted and expanded. Such a project would either deliver, and confirm, the benefits of natural cloud seeding, or, if not, it would nevertheless become a useful resource, a beautiful one, along with its intrinsic worth.
Imagine if more government officials became more aware of this role for forests. Regional and national planning processes could include large natural forests as key climate cooling infrastructure. As such, large natural forests could be regarded as being a far more valuable foundational asset than current ecosystem service assessments recognise. Such a realisation could re-invigorate cross border collaboration, including financial support, for conserving and restoring large forests in critical areas like Borneo.
But there is a barrier to this potential being unleashed. It is a barrier found within the studies, reports, agendas and even minds of people working hard on climate change. It is that the climate-cooling value of large forests is conceptually invisible because “climate action” was reduced to greenhouse-gases. That leads to another barrier for massive forest conservation efforts: neither climate policy nor land use policy recognises the importance of forest-based climate modulation.
The absence of care for the climatic role of large forests doesn’t aid the smartness of policies on other issues, like food security. In some countries, including Indonesia, forests are being cleared to enable more agriculture. This is explained as necessary to combat increasing food insecurity in the face of climate change. However, forest clearance typically increases temperatures regionally, damaging existing agriculture, and thus worsening food insecurity.
Recognising the role of forests in climate modulation would also make it more difficult to justify forest clearance for mining the metals for an ‘energy transition’. That wouldn’t necessarily stop decisions which are, in any case, driven by profit and greed. However, at least it would remove the false fig leaf of environmental ‘concern’.
The question before us is therefore how to overcome the barrier within climatology, and related climate policy, to unleash a ‘positive social tipping point’ in forest conservation for climate cooling.
Here is where it is key to note that the recent years of global temperature changes are inexplicable according to past consensus in climatology. That presents a window of opportunity for a reassessment of the comprehensiveness of our understanding of anthropogenic climate change. In that context, ignoring a more pan-ecological approach to climate dynamics, including ‘biohydrological’ cycles, is no longer tenable. Moreover, dismissing anything other than a carbon-only understanding as giving space to resistance from fossil fuel interests, would be to allow those interests to have polluted the clarity of scientific assessment and its implications.
The climatologists who interface with other fields of science, such as the Earth Systems specialists, could be an influential node between different fields of expertise to spread awareness of this matter. Therefore, if a few senior leaders, key reports, and conferences, in the field of Earth Systems sciences, all communicated this understanding that large forests can act as natural aircon systems, it could bring the environmental professions to a threshold of awareness.
One way forward is to create forest-climate demonstration and observation regions. In addition to major forest restoration activities, they would take measurements that explore connections between forest conditions and the heat, moisture, rainfall and water security in the region. They could also measure other potential beneficial impacts on air quality and on stable water flows. That would make the climate modulating functions of forests measurable, locally visible, and institutionally legible. If that demonstrated local climatic benefits, it would increase public demand and institutional investment. That would mean forest protection could move from being perceived as an environmental preference to being understood as a necessary form of climate infrastructure provision. As a result, forest protection efforts would start reproducing themselves socially in many locations around the world.
In an era of rapid climate change that is now damaging lives, not just landscapes, there is clear reason for a global wave of safe and nature-friendly experiments in natural climate modulation and adaptation. City leaders should not wait years for more research to confirm the specifics of size, proximity and maturity of a forest to achieve regional climate cooling effects. Instead, a ‘post-normal‘ approach to science is the wise one when stakes are high and delaying decisions has potentially massive and irreversible implications. It is an approach to climate science and policy that I outlined with Dr Rupert Read, in Chapter 1 of the book Deep Adaptation: Navigating the realities of climate chaos.
Once I became aware that large healthy forests can be key to reducing the increases in unpleasant and dangerous heat in some cities, while also seeding clouds regionally, I wanted to encourage more discussion about it. When I realised the potential power of city leaders in recognising that large forests can be essential climate infrastructure, I saw the need for this idea to be heard within the mainstream policy pow wows on climate change. That’s why I agreed for the co-founder of the Climate Cooling Initiative to pull me out of my rural life and efforts on deep adaptation, to return to the noise of big city conferencing.
So I’m off to Kuala Lumpur to present at the Global Tipping Points conference. It’s the first time I’ve attended a climate conference since 2022 in Egypt, where Dr Ye Tao and I warned of accelerating climate change and the coming heat spike from reduced cloud cover. I’m hoping that some people attending our workshop will already know our premise, or be open to it, and come up with other, perhaps better, ideas for how to remove barriers to massive distributed action on natural climate cooling. I’ll let you know what happens, on jembendell.com.
One way to share your views and efforts on this topic is within the Deep Adaptation and Metacrisis Leadership group on LinkedIn. It is moderated by the Metacrisis Initiative.
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