An article by scientists from the EU’s Joint Research Centre (JRC), published today in Science, reveals that the loss of forests can substantially affect the local climate by altering the average temperature of an area, and - even more so - affect the maximum summer temperatures. These effects are most obvious in arid zones, followed by temperate, tropical and boreal zones.

The findings could have implications for the UK, which has just over eleven percent forest cover, and which sits in a temperate zone - where the effects of deforestation are the second most noticeable.

Forests affect climate in two ways: by absorbing carbon dioxide and storing large carbon pools in tree biomass and forest soils, and by modulating the biophysical surface properties and affecting the land-atmosphere fluxes of energy. The JRC research focused on changes in forest cover and surface temperature between 2003 and 2012.

Researchers found that forest clearing produces a marked increase of mean annual maximum air surface temperatures, slight changes in minimum temperatures and an overall increase of mean temperatures. But these effects vary according to the climate zone, which is to do with evaporation and transpiration from plant species to the atmosphere in an area.

So far, climate policies and treaties have only taken into account land-based mitigation options like afforestation (planting new trees where none existed previously), reforestation and avoided deforestation or forest degradation, because of the key role played by forests in the global carbon cycle. However, JRC said that policy makers have not yet paid attention to biophysical processes in which trees play a part, such as the exchange of energy and water vapour between the earth’s surface and the atmosphere.