The global climate mitigation potential of increased land-carbon storage.
Abstract
Limiting global warming requires increased carbon sequestration by the land sector in addition to reductions in fossil fuel emissions. To assess the magnitude and spatial distribution of the opportunity for additional storage of carbon on land, we produced a globally consistent spatial dataset (~500-meter resolution) of current (ca. 2016), potential, and unrealized potential carbon storage in woody plant biomass and soil organic matter. Comparing current to potential carbon storage, while excluding areas critical to food production and human habitation, revealed an unrealized carbon reservoir of 287 Pg, including 224 Pg C (78%) in biomass and 63 Pg C (22%) in soil. Improved management of existing forests alone offers 206 Pg C worth of additional sequestration potential or nearly 72% of the global total, with the majority (51% of the global total) concentrated in the tropics. In contrast, restoration of previously cleared land outside of agricultural and urban landscapes offers just 54 Pg C, roughly one quarter (26%) of the opportunity offered by improved forest management and just 19% of the global total. Our results highlight both the magnitude of the land-sector opportunity and the outsized roll the planet's degraded forests have to play in natural climate solutions (NCS). Through comprehensive improvements on previous analyses, including advances in spatial resolution and biophysical completeness (e.g., above and below ground biomass and soil), as well as through the development of a novel conceptual framework for differentiating the NCS opportunity space, we present a robust and practical tool for use by policy-makers and land-managers for planning and implementing NCS on the ground.
- Publication:
-
AGU Fall Meeting Abstracts
- Pub Date:
- December 2020
- Bibcode:
- 2020AGUFMGC012..07W
- Keywords:
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- 0428 Carbon cycling;
- BIOGEOSCIENCES;
- 0430 Computational methods and data processing;
- BIOGEOSCIENCES;
- 1631 Land/atmosphere interactions;
- GLOBAL CHANGE;
- 1632 Land cover change;
- GLOBAL CHANGE