C1.2 Impacts on sectors

C1.2.1 Ecological impacts of the European heatwave 2003 (Chapter 4, Box 4.1)

Anomalous hot and dry conditions affected Europe between June and mid-August 2003 (Fink et al., 2004; Luterbacher et al., 2004; Schär et al., 2004). Since similarly warm summers may occur at least every second year by 2080 in a Special Report on Emissions Scenario (SRES; Naki?enovi? et al., 2000) A2 world, for example (Beniston, 2004; Schär et al., 2004), effects on ecosystems observed in 2003 provide a conservative analogue of future impacts. The major effects of the 2003 heatwave on vegetation and ecosystems appear to have been through heat and drought stress, and wildfires.

Drought stress impacts on vegetation (Gobron et al., 2005; Lobo and Maisongrande, 2006) reduced gross primary production (GPP) in Europe by 30% and respiration to a lesser degree, overall resulting in a net carbon source of 0.5 PgC/yr (Ciais et al., 2005). However, vegetation responses to the heat varied along environmental gradients such as altitude, e.g., by prolonging the growing season at high elevations (Jolly et al., 2005). Some vegetation types, as monitored by remote sensing, were found to recover to a normal state by 2004 (e.g., Gobron et al., 2005), but enhanced crown damage of dominant forest trees in 2004, for example, indicates complex delayed impacts (Fischer, 2005). Freshwater ecosystems experienced prolonged depletion of oxygen in deeper layers of lakes during the heatwave (Jankowski et al., 2006), and there was a significant decline and subsequent poor recovery in species richness of molluscs in the River Saône (Mouthon and Daufresne, 2006). Taken together, this suggests quite variable resilience across ecosystems of different types, with very likely progressive impairment of ecosystem composition and function if such events increase in frequency (e.g., Lloret et al., 2004; Rebetez and Dobbertin, 2004; Jolly et al., 2005; Fuhrer et al., 2006).

High temperatures and greater dry spell durations increase vegetation flammability (e.g., Burgan et al., 1997), and during the 2003 heatwave a record-breaking incidence of spatially extensive wildfires was observed in European countries (Barbosa et al., 2003), with roughly 650,000 ha of forest burned across the continent (De Bono et al., 2004). Fire extent (area burned), although not fire incidence, was exceptional in Europe in 2003, as found for the extraordinary 2000 fire season in the USA (Brown and Hall, 2001), and noted as an increasing trend in the USA since the 1980s (Westerling et al., 2006). In Portugal, area burned was more than twice the previous extreme (1998) and four times the 1980-2004 average (Trigo et al., 2005, 2006). Over 5% of the total forest area of Portugal burned, with an economic impact exceeding ¤1 billion (De Bono et al., 2004).

Long-term impacts of more frequent similar events are very likely to cause changes in biome type, particularly by promoting highly flammable, shrubby vegetation that burns more frequently than less flammable vegetation types such as forests (Nunes et al., 2005), and as seen in the tendency of burned woodlands to reburn at shorter intervals (Vazquez and Moreno, 2001; Salvador et al., 2005). The conversion of vegetation structure in this way on a large enough scale may even cause accelerated climate change through losses of carbon from biospheric stocks (Cox et al., 2000). Future projections for Europe suggest significant reductions in species richness even under mean climate change conditions (Thuiller et al., 2005), and an increased frequency of such extremes (as indicated e.g., by Schär et al., 2004) is likely to exacerbate overall biodiversity losses (Thuiller et al., 2005).