Trees, forest and climate change

Providing shade and cooling the air, trees are vital to the quality of human’s life in Hamburg. However, our trees face challenging conditions along streets – and with climate change. In particular, freshly planted trees are thus subjected to stress, indicated by slow growth and failure gain...

252 million years ago, volcanic eruptions led to massive climate changes. Around the globe, roughly 75 percent of all land-based organisms and roughly 90 percent of all marine organisms died out as a result. Dr. William Foster from Universität Hamburg’s Center for Earth System Research and...

Moors cover three percent of our planet’s land surface, but store twice as much carbon as all forests combined. But if peat is extracted and the moorland soils are drained, they can become veritable carbon dioxide factories.

In Germany, natural moors once covered an area as large as...

A group of 59 international scientists has uncovered new information about the distinct effects of climate change on boreal forests and peatlands, which threaten to worsen wildfires and accelerate global warming. Lars Kutzbach from the Center of Earth System Research and Sustainability at the...

When individual countries clear less of their rainforests, they receive a financial reward from the United Nations (UN). In this regard, it is up to each country to prove how much of its local rainforests was preserved. But the costs involved in delivering the proof can be higher than the...

Our forests make essential contributions to climate protection: they absorb CO2 from the atmosphere, and store it. Further, many long-lived wood products, which can be manufactured using comparatively low-emissions methods, can store carbon for extended periods of time. Taken together, the...

Rambling through Hamburg and its environs, you will discover a landscape sculpted by the ice ages. Glaciers of the past pushed large amounts of scree shaping today’s hilly countryside northeast of the City. Meltwater leached the glacial Elbe valley and wind-blown sand deposits piled up into...

Even old trees absorb large amounts of carbon, removing CO2 (carbon dioxide) from the atmosphere. This was recently proven for the first time using trees from the rainforests in Surinam, as Professor Michael Köhl from Universität Hamburg’s Center for Earth System Research and Sustainability...

Like in the “The Lord of the Rings” movies, trees occasionally make their way to faraway lands. Whether tropical rainforests, evergreen coniferous forests or treeless steppes: our planet’s vegetation zones are constantly changing. At the end of the last glacial period, around 11,000 years ago...