Worldwide, peatlands suffer from land subsidence and greenhouse gas emissions due to artificial drainage inducing peat decomposition. Under anthropogenic climate change, these issues require measures to reduce the emission of greenhouse gases and protect low-lying areas from increasing flood risk. Tighter control of groundwater levels is required, both within existing agricultural systems and through the development of new agricultural systems suitable for farming under high groundwater levels or inundation. The complexity and value-laden nature of the issue warrants the development of a comprehensive overview of potential and side effects of measures. In this paper such an overview is synthesized based on a mixed-method approach for a special case, The Netherlands. The Dutch peatlands comprise extensive land areas in the low-lying west and north of The Netherlands. The case is exceptional as most of these peatlands lie below sea level, sustain world-class intensive dairy farming and are subject to multiple other environmental, economic and societal challenges. Here, land subsidence increases flood risk, salt-water intrusion and the costs of water management, particularly under global climate change. To mitigate land subsidence, both technical measures and alternative land uses can be envisaged. However, the literature about these is fragmented, complicating a careful identification and selection of measures. To address this knowledge gap, we review 27 technical measures and alternative land use options and synthesize evidence and insights for 15 effects. Technical measures allowing continuation of existing dairy farming provide relatively low-risk interventions for farmers, but will only reduce, not stop land subsidence and greenhouse gas emissions. Alternative land-use options, particularly paludiculture, are in a start-up stage of development and can stop land subsidence. However, more research is required to reduce and control methane and potential nitrous oxide emissions during inundation required for crops such as (narrowleaf) cattail and azolla. Paludiculture can provide ecosystem services related to water management and nutrient status, as well as raw materials for a bio-based economy. Gradual transitions in space and time between farming and nature can be envisaged, providing incentives to diversify land use in the Dutch peatlands. This case study identifies key questions and provides valuable insights for peatland management worldwide. Reducing land subsidence and greenhouse gas emissions from peatlands is feasible, but requires thoughtful interventions that cautiously make and align trade-offs between various interests and uncertainties.

Increasing drought pressure under anthropogenic climate change may jeopardize the potential of tropical forests to capture carbon in woody biomass and act as a long-term carbon dioxide sink. To evaluate this risk, we assessed drought impacts in 483 tree-ring chronologies from across the tropics and found an overall modest stem growth decline (2.5% with a 95% confidence interval of 2.2 to 2.7%) during the 10% driest years since 1930. Stem growth declines exceeded 10% in 25% of cases and were larger at hotter and drier sites and for gymnosperms compared with angiosperms. Growth declines generally did not outlast drought years and were partially mitigated by growth stimulation in wet years. Thus, pantropical forest carbon sequestration through stem growth has hitherto shown drought resilience that may, however, diminish under future climate change.

Tropical forests and woodlands are key components of the global carbon and water cycles. Yet, how climate change affects these biogeochemical cycles is poorly understood because of scarce long-term observations of tropical tree growth. The recent rise in tropical tree-ring studies may help to fill this gap, but a large-scale quantitative analysis of their potential in global change research is missing. We compiled a list of all tropical tree species known to form annual tree rings and built a network encompassing 492 tropical ring-width chronologies to evaluate the potential to generate insights on climate sensitivity of woody productivity and to build centuries-long reconstructions of climate variability. We assess chronology quality, length, and climatic representativeness and explore how these change along climatic gradients. Finally, we applied species-distribution modeling to identify regions with potential for tree-ring studies in ecological and climatic studies. The number of tropical chronologies has rapidly increased, with ∼400 added over the past two decades. Yet, tree-ring studies are biased towards high-elevation locations, with gaps in warmer and wetter climates, on the African continent, and for angiosperm species. The longest chronologies with strongest climate signals (i.e., synchronous growth variations among trees) are from cool regions. In wet regions, climate signals and precipitation sensitivity decrease. Most tropical regions harbor 5–15 (and up to 80) species with proven potential to generate chronologies. The potential for long climate reconstructions is particularly high in drier high elevation sites. Our findings support strategies to effectively expand tree-ring research in the tropics, by targeting specific species and regions. Tropical dendrochronology can importantly contribute to global change research by generating historical context of climate extremes, quantifying climate sensitivity of woody productivity and benchmarking vegetation models.