%0 Journal Article
%T Projected Impacts of Bioenergy-Demand-Induced Land Use and Cover Changes on Regional Climate in Central Europe
%A Fang Yin
%A Yihui Xiong
%A Li Jiang
%A Zhiguo Pang
%J Advances in Meteorology
%D 2013
%I Hindawi Publishing Corporation
%R 10.1155/2013/293937
%X Energy shortfalls are becoming more and more serious all over the world, and worldwide governments have tried to promote the development of biofuels in order to mitigate the climatic impacts of massive fossil fuel consumption. Since the land is the main input factor of the bioenergy production, the development of biofuels will inevitably lead to change of the land use structure and allocation and thereby affect the climate system. With Central Europe as the study area, this study explored the impacts of land use/land cover change (LUCC) on climate under the influence of demand of bioenergy production for land resources. First, the land use structure from 2010 to 2050 is simulated with the Agriculture and Land Use model in MiniCam. The result indicates that the main conversion will be mainly from grassland and forest to cropland and from cropland to grassland. Then the Dynamics of Land System model was used to spatially simulate the LUCC in the future. The impacts of LUCC on the climate were analyzed on the basis of simulation with the Weather Research and Forecasting (WRF) model. The climate change will be characterized by the increase of latent heat flux and temperature and the decrease of precipitation. 1. Introduction Energy shortfalls have been increasingly serious all over the world; meanwhile, the renewable energy is rapidly developing but has not become a significant source of energy yet [1]. Since the 1990s, the United States, high-energy-consumption countries in Europe, and the agricultural products trading countries such as Brazil have begun to develop the renewable bioenergy [2]. As the main type of the renewables, the worldwide governments are also promoting its development in order to mitigate the climatic effects of the consumption of massive fossil fuel. At the same time, it is becoming a scientific research hotspot in recent decades. Some previous researches on the effectiveness of bioenergy have estimated the potential impacts of the development of renewable energy according to the change of greenhouse gas (GHG) emission due to land use/land cover change (LUCC) and by means of life cycle analysis (LCA) [3]. LUCC has great impacts on GHGs, and it also modifies the surface energy and water balance [4, 5] through influencing the near-surface temperature and precipitation. Besides, it serves as an additional driving force of the climate change at the global [6¨C9] and regional [10¨C12] scales. This study mainly focused on the effects of bioenergy development on LUCC, which influences the biogeophysical processes of the land surface and
%U http://www.hindawi.com/journals/amete/2013/293937/