CLIMATE CHANGE AND NATURAL VEGETATION IN CHINA

The climate change scenarios due to the human activity for East Asia and China by 2050 have been estimated bymeans of a simple global social-economic-climate-impact model combined with seven GCMs.The climate change sce-narios present that the annual mean temperature might increase obviously,by about 1.4℃,and the annual total precipi-tation might increase by about 4% in whole China in comparison with the present climate.The change of the precipita-tion might be much smaller than that of the temperature.The potential impacts of human activity-induced climate change on natural vegetation in China were estimated us-ing the vegetation-climate model developed specially for Chinese vegetation types and different climate change scenariosderived from seven GCMs for 2050.All scenarios suggest a great change in natural vegetation although details of pre-dicted types vary among the scenarios.There will be a northward shift of the vegetation types,with increase in the arealextent of tropical rainforests and decrease of the cold temperate coniferous forest and tundra.Consequently,consideringthese changes and shifts,especially in combination with the likely negative balance of precipitation andevapotranspiration,the moisture stress,i.e.,less water availability arises,the possible influences of climate change onChinese agriculture is also assessed roughly in this paper.

CLIMATE CHANGE AND NATURAL VEGETATION IN CHINA