NEW research has challenged "catastrophic" climate change forecasts for the world's tropical rainforests, instead predicting that they will survive even if greenhouse gas emissions aren't cut.
An international team of computer climate modelling experts found rainforests in Asia, Africa and the Americas would not dramatically shrink, in contrast to warnings, including those from Australia's Chief Climate Commissioner Professor Tim Flannery, that global warming was a catastrophe for tropical rainforests.
The new research says the ability for rainforest plants to adapt to climate change has been underestimated.
Professor Flannery last year said "rainforests are also being stressed by the warming, with many species at their limits of temperature tolerance and facing increased risk of extinction," as the Climate Commission unveiled its 14th report on global warming.
But the new research, led by the UK's Centre for Ecology and Hydrology, used 22 climate modelling computer systems and programs incorporating plant biology to explore the response of tropical forests in the Americas, Africa and Asia to greenhouse-gas-induced climate change.
"A number of previous analyses have investigated potential vulnerability of tropical forests under climate change. Some ... suggest that anthropogenically induced climate change across Amazonia could cause catastrophic losses of forest cover and biomass - die-back," the centre's peer-reviewed report, published in Nature Geoscience, said.
"We find the possibility of climate-induced damage to tropical rainforests in the period to year 2100 ... might be lower than some earlier studies."
"There is also increasing evidence that the long-term temperature response of respiration (in plants) is dynamic, capable of thermal acclimation (adaption to changing temperatures).
"Generally, acclimation, again not yet included in any major land surface model, is believed to mitigate the rate of increase in respiration rates (the amount plants breathe) in the event of a transition to warmer temperatures.
"There are suggestions that photosynthesis can also acclimate to rising temperatures, although the extent to which this might occur in tropical forest species remains unknown."
The research said rainforests would not be destroyed by 2100 even in a "business-as-usual" scenario where industry does not cut emissions.
