Environmental change in the humid tropics and monsoonal regions

Introduction Research over the past few decades has illuminated the dynamic nature of tropical palaeoclimates and the important role that the tropics played in global climate patters. Increasingly, the realization has grown that climate changes at high latitudes cannot simply be extrapolated into tropical regions. Rather, the tropics have sometimes led the changes or have responded to them differently when compared with their high latitude counterparts. Similarly, the tropics, spanning 46o of latitude in two hemispheres on three continents, do not respond uniformly to a given forcing. In this chapter we review evidence from the last glacial maximum (defined in the high latitude northern hemisphere) to modern, and consider features of environmental change ranging from climatic variability to extinction of megafauna