Commodity-driven deforestation doubles local warming from tropical forest loss

Abstract Tropical deforestation causes substantial changes to local climate including strong local warming. Deforestation is driven by a wide a range of factors including commodity production, shifting agriculture and forestry. However, it is unknown whether the local climate impacts of forest loss vary across these drivers of the deforestation. We used remotely sensed atmospheric and land-surface datasets to explore whether the local warming due to tropical forest loss from 2001 to 2019 varied with the driver of deforestation. In the Amazon, forest loss caused by commodity-driven deforestation caused 0.66 °C of warming, more than double the warming from shifting agriculture (0.31 °C). Across the tropics, forest loss due to commodity-driven deforestation caused a warming of 0.02 °C per percentage point of forest loss, double the warming due to shifting agriculture (0.01 °C per percentage point of forest loss). Compared to commodity-driven deforestation, shifting agriculture leads to smaller reductions in leaf area index and smaller increases in surface albedo likely due to the subsequent land abandonment and regrowth of vegetation that is associated with this driver. Our results suggest that a projected transition from shifting agriculture to commodity-driven deforestation will increase the local climate warming from tropical forest loss with negative impacts for communities living in tropical forest regions.