Global Change Research Program, National Center for Environmental Assessment, Office of Research and Development, US Environmental Protection Agency, 1200 Pennsylvania Avenue NW, Washington, DC 20460, USA.
Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2010 Dec 7;107(49):20887-92. doi: 10.1073/pnas.1002096107. Epub 2010 Nov 15.
Understanding the impacts of climate change on people and the environment requires an understanding of the dynamics of both climate and land use/land cover changes. A range of future climate scenarios is available for the conterminous United States that have been developed based on widely used international greenhouse gas emissions storylines. Climate scenarios derived from these emissions storylines have not been matched with logically consistent land use/cover maps for the United States. This gap is a critical barrier to conducting effective integrated assessments. This study develops novel national scenarios of housing density and impervious surface cover that are logically consistent with emissions storylines. Analysis of these scenarios suggests that combinations of climate and land use/cover can be important in determining environmental conditions regulated under the Clean Air and Clean Water Acts. We found significant differences in patterns of habitat loss and the distribution of potentially impaired watersheds among scenarios, indicating that compact development patterns can reduce habitat loss and the number of impaired watersheds. These scenarios are also associated with lower global greenhouse gas emissions and, consequently, the potential to reduce both the drivers of anthropogenic climate change and the impacts of changing conditions. The residential housing and impervious surface datasets provide a substantial first step toward comprehensive national land use/land cover scenarios, which have broad applicability for integrated assessments as these data and tools are publicly available.
了解气候变化对人类和环境的影响，需要了解气候和土地利用/土地覆被变化的动态。美国本土有一系列基于广泛使用的国际温室气体排放情景的未来气候情景。这些排放情景衍生出的气候情景与美国逻辑一致的土地利用/覆盖图并不匹配。这一差距是进行有效综合评估的一个关键障碍。本研究开发了新颖的、全国性的住房密度和不透水面覆盖情景，这些情景与排放情景在逻辑上是一致的。对这些情景的分析表明，气候和土地利用/覆盖的组合在决定《清洁空气法》和《清洁水法》所规定的环境条件方面可能很重要。我们发现，不同情景下的生境丧失模式和潜在受损流域的分布存在显著差异，这表明紧凑型发展模式可以减少生境丧失和受损流域的数量。这些情景还与全球温室气体排放量较低有关，因此有可能减少人为气候变化的驱动因素和变化条件的影响。这些住宅住房和不透水面数据集为全面的全国土地利用/土地覆盖情景提供了重要的第一步，这些数据和工具是公开的，因此具有广泛的综合评估适用性。
