Simulated carbon emissions from land-use change are substantially enhanced by accounting for agricultural management
By Thomas A. M. Pugh, A. Arneth, S. Olin, Anders Ahlström, A. Bayer, K. K. Goldewijk, M. Lindeskog, G. Schurgers. 2015
134 citations recorded by the source corpus.
It is over three decades since a large terrestrial carbon sink (ST) was first reported. The magnitude of the net sink is now relatively well known, and its importance for dampening atmospheric CO2 accumulation, and hence climate change, widely recognised. But the contributions of underlying processes are not well defined, particularly the role of emissions from land-use change (ELUC) versus the biospheric carbon uptake (SL; ST = SL − ELUC). One key aspect of the interplay of ELUC and SL is the role of agricultural processes in land-use change emissions, which has not yet been clearly quantified at the global scale. Here we assess the effect of representing agricultural land management in a dynamic global vegetation model. Accounting for harvest, grazing and tillage resulted in cumulative ELUC since 1850 ca. 70% larger than in simulations ignoring these processes, but also changed the timescale over which these emissions occurred and led to underestimations of the carbon sequestered by possible future reforestation actions. The vast majority of Earth system models in the recent IPCC Fifth Assessment Report omit these processes, suggesting either an overestimation in their present-day ST, or an underestimation of SL, of up to 1.0 Pg C a−1. Management processes influencing crop productivity per se are important for food supply, but were found to have little influence on ELUC.
Subfields: Global and Planetary Change
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/5cf7f6311ed5ee8068ac6a28409a9562197cd757
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In Global and Planetary Change
Citations in the corpus
- Impacts of water and land resources exploitation on agricultural carbon emissions: The water-land-energy-carbon nexus (2018, background): “Agricultural land use activities, such as agricultural management and operations (Lal, 2004; Nadeu et al., 2015; Pugh et al., 2015; Ogle et al., 2014), land sparing (Lamb et al., 2016), Land management (Smith et al., 2008), tillage system (West and Marland, 2002) and land consolidation (Tan et al.,…”
- Role of forest regrowth in global carbon sink dynamics (2019, background): “These changes are variable across forest types and for extratropical forests will likely take centuries to realize (29).”