Future climate change challenges to sustainable forest management in the Zambezi basin

Abstract

The issue of estimating future climate variability and change of seasonal rainfall and temperature under which ecosystem processes and human interventions will take place in the future is relatively new to forestry. The Zambezi River Basin in southern Africa experiences highly variable climatic conditions across the basin and through time that can affect forest ecosystems in a number of ways. Estimating future climate, , using current methodologies could provide information in a form that could support forest managers with policy and technical decision making in aid of adaptation to climate variability and change. Predicting the likely seasonal variations of rainfall and temperature in terms of decades could certainly be useful to forest management which operates in longer time frames than is the case in other crops. Most of the people living along the Zambezi River basin depend on forest for their livelihoods. Therefore, this study, presents a framework for assessing predictions and projections of future climates which may have impact on the vulnerability of existing forest ecosystems and in the process, impede the achievement of sustainable forest management objectives in the basin. To estimate future climates in terms of mid-summer seasonal rainfall and maximum temperatures over the Zambezi River Basin, this study used the global climate model, the conformal-cubic atmospheric model (CCAM) to produce hindcasts (reforecasts) of seasonal-to-interannual values and to produce multiple decades of climate change projections. Climate projections indicate the possibility for a switch in ecosystem type for this region with far lower likelihood of appreciable tree cover within the 2100 time horizon.