Informing Nature-based Climate Solutions with the best-available science: a research agenda for the land-atmosphere flux community
Abstract
Managed alterations to ecosystems designed to increase carbon sequestration or reduce greenhouse gas emissions - hereafter Nature-based Climate Solutions (NbCS) - have growing public and private support. Despite this enthusiasm, the realizable benefits of NbCS, and unintended consequences to be avoided, are not well understood. At regional scales where policy decisions are often made, NbCS mitigation potentials are estimated from soil and tree survey data that can miss important carbon sources and sinks within an ecosystem, and do not reveal NbCS effects on local energy budgets, which may or may not be climatically beneficial. The only direct observations of ecosystem-scale carbon and energy exchanges (e.g. from flux towers) have not yet been systematically assessed for what they can tell us about NbCS potentials, and state-of-the-art remote sensing products and land-surface models are not yet being widely used to inform NbCS policy making or implementation. As a result, there is a critical mismatch between the point and plant scale data most often used to determine NbCS benefits, the ecosystem and landscape scales where NbCS projects are actually implemented, and the regional- to continental scales that are most relevant to policy making. We present a research agenda to confront this gulf using data and tools that have long been used to understand the mechanisms driving ecosystem carbon and energy cycling, but have not yet been widely applied to NbCS. We outline steps for creating NbCS assessments that: 1) are informed by ecosystem-scale land-atmosphere flux observations which integrate multiple above- and belowground carbon sources and sinks, and provide information about energy budget impacts; 2) are spatially resolved so that policy can be crafted with a knowledge of where the benefits, or negative consequences, of a given NbCS are greatest; and 3) are temporally resolved to describe not only the present day NbCS potentials, but also the permanence of these benefits into a future characterized by pervasive climate feedbacks. We contend that these research goals can largely be accomplished by relatively subtle shifts in the scales at which pre-existing tools are applied and blended together, though we also highlight some opportunities for more radical shifts in measurement technology or analytical approaches.
- Publication:
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AGU Fall Meeting Abstracts
- Pub Date:
- December 2021
- Bibcode:
- 2021AGUFMGC44B..03N