There are a number of ways in which changes in land use can influence climate. The most direct influence is through the alteration of Earth’s albedo, or surface reflectance. For example, the replacement of forest by cropland and pasture in the middle latitudes over the past several centuries has led to an increase in albedo, which in turn has led to greater reflection of incoming solar radiation in those regions. This replacement of forest by agriculture has been associated with a change in global average radiative forcing of approximately –0.2 watt per square metre since 1750. In Europe and other major agricultural regions, such land-use conversion began more than 1,000 years ago and has proceeded nearly to completion. For Europe, the negative radiative forcing due to land-use change has probably been substantial, perhaps approaching –5 watts per square metre. The influence of early land use on radiative forcing may help to explain a long period of cooling in Europe that followed a period of relatively mild conditions roughly 1,000 years ago. It is generally believed that the mild temperatures of this “medieval warm period,” which was followed by a long period of cooling, rivaled those of 20th-century Europe.

Land-use changes can also influence climate through their influence on the exchange of heat between Earth’s surface and the atmosphere. For example, vegetation helps to facilitate the evaporation of water into the atmosphere through evapotranspiration. In this process, plants take up liquid water from the soil through their root systems. Eventually this water is released through transpiration into the atmosphere, as water vapour through the stomata in leaves. While deforestation generally leads to surface cooling due to the albedo factor discussed above, the land surface may also be warmed as a result of the release of latent heat by the evapotranspiration process. The relative importance of these two factors, one exerting a cooling effect and the other a warming effect, varies by both season and region. While the albedo effect is likely to dominate in middle latitudes, especially during the period from autumn through spring, the evapotranspiration effect may dominate during the summer in the midlatitudes and year-round in the tropics. The latter case is particularly important in assessing the potential impacts of continued tropical deforestation.

The rate at which tropical regions are deforested is also relevant to the process of carbon sequestration (see Carbon cycle feedbacks), the long-term storage of carbon in underground cavities and biomass rather than in the atmosphere. By removing carbon from the atmosphere, carbon sequestration acts to mitigate global warming. Deforestation contributes to global warming, as fewer plants are available to take up carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. In addition, as fallen trees, shrubs, and other plants are burned or allowed to slowly decompose, they release as carbon dioxide the carbon they stored during their lifetimes. Furthermore, any land-use change that influences the amount, distribution, or type of vegetation in a region can affect the concentrations of biogenic aerosols, though the impact of such changes on climate is indirect and relatively minor.

Stratospheric ozone depletion

Since the 1970s the loss of ozone (O₃) from the stratosphere has led to a small amount of negative radiative forcing of the surface. This negative forcing represents a competition between two distinct effects caused by the fact that ozone absorbs solar radiation. In the first case, as ozone levels in the stratosphere are depleted, more solar radiation reaches Earth’s surface. In the absence of any other influence, this rise in insolation would represent a positive radiative forcing of the surface. However, there is a second effect of ozone depletion that is related to its greenhouse properties. As the amount of ozone in the stratosphere is decreased, there is also less ozone to absorb longwave radiation emitted by Earth’s surface. With less absorption of radiation by ozone, there is a corresponding decrease in the downward reemission of radiation. This second effect overwhelms the first and results in a modest negative radiative forcing of Earth’s surface and a modest cooling of the lower stratosphere by approximately 0.5 °C (0.9 °F) per decade since the 1970s.