Deforestation Impacts on Temperatures and People

Tropical Trees and Temperatures

Tress in the tropics are surprisingly good at keeping the local environment relatively cool compared to nearby cleared areas. Specifically, trees provide shade and via evapotranspiration cool the local environment. Loss or degradation of tropical forest cover can rapidly increase daytime temperatures.

Working with atmospheric scientists and occupational health experts at the University of Washington as well as scientists from The Nature Conservancy, we have shown recent (21st century) deforestation is associated with large, local temperature increases that cannot be explained by climate variability and change over this time period (Vargas-Zeppetello et al., 2020, ERL).

In follow-up work, we showed that deforestation 2003-2018 is associated with increased heat exposure and loss of safe work time for several million outdoor workers across the tropics (Parsons et al., 2021, One Earth).