Managing Soils and Ecosystems for Mitigating Anthropogenic Carbon Emissions and Advancing Global Food Security

By Rattan Lal. 2010

509 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Soil carbon (C) is a dynamic and integral part of the global C cycle. It has been a source of atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) since the dawn of settled agriculture, depleting more than 320 billion metric tons (Pg) from the terrestrial pool, 78±12 Pg of which comes from soil. In comparison, approximately 292 Pg C have been emitted through fossil-fuel combustion since about 1750. However, terrestrial pools can act as a sink for as much as 50 parts per million of atmospheric CO2 for 100 to 150 years. The technical sink capacity of US soils is 0.288 Pg C per year; Earth's terrestrial biosphere can act as a sink for up to 3.8 Pg C per year. The economic potential of C storage depends on its costs and cobenefits, such as global food security, water quality, and soil biodiversity. Therefore, optimally managing the soil C pool must be the bash of any strategy to improve and sustain agronomic production, especially in developing countries.

Subfields: Ecology, Global and Planetary Change, Soil Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/7631d033bffddca4f55590dda5f09de55b341d99

How researchers see this paper

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In Ecology

1. Nils Westling
2. E. Alfredsson
3. M. Karlsson
4. Rattan Lal
5. G. Brookes
6. P. Barfoot
7. J. Weiss
8. Pete Smith

In Global and Planetary Change

1. Rattan Lal
2. G. Conti
3. Sandra Díaz

In Soil Science

1. Nils Westling
2. E. Alfredsson
3. M. Karlsson
4. Rattan Lal
5. T. Gomiero
6. G. Brookes
7. P. Barfoot
8. M. Jarecki

Citations in the corpus

• Digging deeper: A holistic perspective of factors affecting soil organic carbon sequestration in agroecosystems (2018, background): “These estimates are simi- lar to those presented in 2010 for soils of diverse ecosystems at 1.2–3.1 Pg C (2.15 Pg) (Lal, 2010) but are based on more recent data on land use and rates of SOC sequestration.”
• Climate policy co-benefits: a review (2020, background): “Lal, Follett, Stewart, and Kimble (2007) estimate the potential of improved farming practices that increase the soil carbon pool and Lal (2010a, 2010b) calculates that atmospheric CO2 levels can be reduced by 50 ppm by the end of the twenty-first century in parallel with producing significant…”