Quantifying the impact of future land-use changes against increases in GHG concentrations

The impact on atmospheric climate of future land-use changes relative to the increase in greenhouse gas (GHG) concentrations is assessed in time-slice simula-tions with the ARPEGE-Climat atmospheric general cir-culation model (AGCM). Future land cover maps are pro-vided by the IMAGE2.2 integrated model, developed by RIVM. We show that the relative impact of vegetation change to GHG concentration increase is of the order of 10 % for a B2 scenario, and can reach 30 % over localized tropical regions. 1