Whangarei District ecosystem services background report Technical Report
- Author
- Coleman, D.
- Year
- 2009
- Publisher / Organisation
- Whangarei District Council
- Summary
- Climate change has long been perceived as a threat to the environment, but in recent years this threat perception has expanded to include social, cultural, security, and economic concerns. The theory underpinning anthropogenic climate change, put very simplistically, is that increased emissions of so-called greenhouse gases (carbon dioxide, methane and so on) into the atmosphere traps more energy from solar sources which, in turn, can raise global temperatures. As global temperature rises, it is expected to have an impact on the habitable ranges of flora and fauna, increase natural hazard risk, impact on traditional methods and areas of food production, increase infrastructure costs, and, in short, impact on many other areas of global human life. Higher global temperatures can affect the global biogeochemical cycles by changing various rates of reaction at massive scales. It is also generally recognised that future temperature changes will not necessarily rise in a relatively predictable linear fashion, but instead will consist of tipping points, in which one action causes further reactions across the board that either speed up or slow down the rate of temperature increase. The projected changes for Northland in terms of temperature range between 1.1