Accounting for soil carbon sequestration in national inventories: a soil scientist’s perspective

By Jonathan Sanderman, Jeff Baldock. 2010

169 citations recorded by the source corpus.

As nations debate whether and how best to include the agricultural sector in greenhouse gas pollution reduction schemes, the role of soil organic carbon as a potential large carbon sink has been thrust onto center stage. Results from most agricultural field trials indicate a relative increase in soil carbon stocks with the adoption of various improved management practices. However, the few available studies with time series data suggest that this relative gain is often due to a reduction or cessation of soil carbon losses rather than an actual increase in stocks. On the basis of this observation, we argue here that stock change data from agricultural field trials may have limited predictive power when the state of the soil carbon system is unknown and that current IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) accounting methodologies developed from the trial results may not properly credit these management activities. In particular, the use of response ratios is inconsistent with the current scientific understanding of carbon cycling in soils and response ratios will overestimate the net–net sequestration of soil carbon if the baseline is not at steady state.

Subfields: Ecology, Environmental Chemistry, Soil Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/252120324be21dafbd4d2787664e0cda85025997

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Ecology

1. Jörg Rinklebe
2. Tomislav Hengl
3. Jonathan Sanderman
4. Greg Fiske
5. Gerard B. M. Heuvelink

In Environmental Chemistry

1. Jörg Rinklebe
2. Y. Ok

In Soil Science

1. H. Kua
2. Jörg Rinklebe
3. Nanthi S. Bolan
4. Tomislav Hengl
5. Souradeep Gupta
6. Jonathan Sanderman
7. Greg Fiske

Citations in the corpus

• Multifunctional applications of biochar beyond carbon storage (2021, background): “farming techniques generally lead to the depletion of C from soil [95,96].”
• Soil carbon debt of 12,000 years of human land use (2017, background): “SOC stocks, while often declining most rapidly in the first decade after land-use change (35), often take many decades to over a century to reach a new steady state (36, 37).”