This is the first book to examine how tropical rain forest ecology is altered by climate change, rather than simply seeing how plant communities were altered. The book’s goal is to provide a current overview of the impacts of climate change on tropical forests. It aims to investigate past, present, and future climatic influences on the ecosystems with the highest biodiversity on the planet.

The loss of biodiversity is a major environmental problem in nearly every terrestrial ecosystem on Earth. This loss is accelerating driven by climate change, as well as by other causes including agricultural exploitation, fragmentation and degradation triggered by land use changes. The crucial issue under debate is the impact on the welfare of current and future population, and the role of humans in the exploitation of natural resources. This is of particular importance in Central America, which it is amongst the richest and most threatened biodiversity regions on the Earth, and where the loss of ecosystems strongly affects its socio-economic vulnerability. This book addresses the impacts of climate and land-use change on tropical forest ecosystems in this important region, and assesses the expected economic costs if no policy action is taken, under different future scenarios and for different geographical scales. This innovative collection utilises both theoretical approaches and empirical results to provide a conceptual framework for an integrated analysis of climate and land-use change impacts on forest ecosystems and related economic effects, offering insight into the complex relationship between ecosystems and benefits to humans. This important contribution to forest ecosystems and climate change provides invaluable reading for students and scholars in the fields of environmental and ecological economics, environmental science and forestry, natural resource management, agriculture and climate change.

Climate change represents one of the most alarming long-term threats to ecosystems the world over. This new collection of papers provides, for the first time, an overview of the potentially serious impact that climate change may have on tropical forests. The authors, a multi-disciplinary group of leading experts in climatology, forestry, ecology and conservation biology, present a state-of-knowledge snapshot of how tropical forests are likely to react to the changes being wrought on our planet's atmosphere and climate. Tropical forests represent extraordinary harbours for biological diversity, and yet as deforestation and degradation continue apace, they are under greater pressure from human impacts than ever before. Climate change adds yet another threat to these valuable ecosystems, and this volume demonstrates just how significant a problem this may really be. The authors identify certain types of forest, including tropical montane cloud forest that may be particularly vulnerable. They also show the strong likelihood of global warming aggravating problems in already fragmented forest areas.

This updated and expanded second edition of a much lauded work provides a current overview of the impacts of climate change on tropical forests. The authors also investigate past, present and future climatic influences on the ecosystems with the highest biodiversity on the planet. Tropical Rainforest Responses to Climatic Change, Second Edition, looks at how tropical rain forest ecology is altered by climate change, rather than simply seeing how plant communities were altered. Shifting the emphasis on to ecological processes, e.g. how diversity is structured by climate and the subsequent impact on tropical forest ecology, provides the reader with a more comprehensive coverage. A major theme of the book is the interaction between humans, climate and forest ecology. The authors, all foremost experts in their fields, explore the long term occupation of tropical systems, the influence of fire and the future climatic effects of deforestation, together with anthropogenic emissions. Incorporating modelling of past and future systems paves the way for a discussion of conservation from a climatic perspective, rather than the usual plea to stop logging. This second edition provides an updated text in this rapidly evolving field. The existing chapters are revised and updated and two entirely new chapters deal with Central America and the effect of fire on wet forest systems. In the first new chapter, the paleoclimate and ecological record from Central America (Lozano, Correa, Bush) is discussed, while the other deals with the impact of fire on tropical ecosystems. It is hoped that Jonathon Overpeck, who has been centrally involved in the 2007 and 2010 IPCC reports, will provide a Foreword to the book.

Changing Tropical Forests begins with an overview of the history of deforestation in tropical America and the tasks facing Latin American environmental historians. Based on proceedings of a 1991 conference sponsored by the Forest History Society and IUFRO Forest History Group in Costa Rica, the contributors offer detailed accounts of the enivornmental history of specific forest conditions, grasslands, and changing ecosystems of Costa Rica, Mexico, Surinam, and Brazil. the role of human intervention in this process of change is also discussed. Contributors. William Balée, James R. Barborak, Peter Boomgaard, Larissa V. Brown, Gerardo Budowski, John Dargavel, Warren Dean, Silvia del Amo R., Elizabeth Graham, J. Régis Guillaumon, Rhena Hoffmann, Sally P. Horn, Sebastião Kengen, Herman W. Konrad, Mary Pamela Lehmann, Robert D. Leier, Murdo J. MacLeod, M. Patricia Marchak, Elinor G. K. Melville, David M. Pendergast, Susan M. Pierce, Leslie E. Sponsel, Richard P. Tucker, Terry West

This book addresses the social implications of climate change and climatic variability on indigenous peoples and communities living in the highlands, lowlands, and coastal areas of Latin America and the Caribbean. Across the region, indigenous people already perceive and experience negative effects of climate change and variability. Many indigenous communities find it difficult to adapt in a culturally sustainable manner. In fact, indigenous peoples often blame themselves for the changes they observe in nature, despite their limited emission of green house gasses. Not only is the viability of their livelihoods threatened, resulting in food insecurity and poor health, but also their cultural integrity is being challenged, eroding the confidence in solutions provided by traditional institutions and authorities. The book is based on field research among indigenous communities in three major eco-geographical regions: the Amazon; the Andes and Sub-Andes; and the Caribbean and Mesoamerica. It finds major inter-regional differences in the impacts observed between areas prone to rapid- and slow-onset natural hazards. In Mesoamerican and the Caribbean, increasingly severe storms and hurricanes damage infrastructure and property, and even cause loss of land, reducing access to livelihood resources. In the Columbian Amazon, changes in precipitation and seasonality have direct immediate effects on livelihoods and health, as crops often fail and the reproduction of fish stock is threatened by changes in the river ebb and flow. In the Andean region, water scarcity for crops and livestock, erosion of ecosystems and changes in biodiversity threatens food security, both within indigenous villages and among populations who depend on indigenous agriculture, causing widespread migration to already crowded urban areas. The study aims to increase understanding on the complexity of how indigenous communities are impacted by climate change and the options for improving their resilience and adaptability to these phenomena. The goal is to improve indigenous peoples rights and opportunities in climate change adaptation, and guide efforts to design effective and sustainable adaptation initiatives.

Tropical forests represent the world's most biodiverse ecosystems and play a key role in hydrology, carbon storage and exchange. Many of the human-induced pressures these regions are facing, e.g. fragmentation and deforestation, have been widely reported and well documented. However, there have been surprisingly few efforts to synthesize cutting-edge science in the area of tropical forest interaction with atmospheric change. At a time when our global atmosphere is undergoing a period of rapid change, both in terms of climate and in the cycling of essential elements such as carbon and nitrogen, a thorough and up-to-date analysis is now timely. This research level text, suitable for graduate level students as well as professional researchers in plant ecology, tropical forestry, climate change science, and conservation biology, explores the vigorous contemporary debate as to how rapidly tropical forests may be affected by atmospheric change, and what this may mean for their future.