Unexpectedly large impact of forest management and grazing on global vegetation biomass
By K. Erb, Thomas Kastner, C. Plutzar, A. Bais, N. Carvalhais, T. Fetzel, S. Gingrich, H. Haberl, C. Lauk, M. Niedertscheider and 3 more. Nature, 2017
616 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Carbon stocks in vegetation have a key role in the climate system. However, the magnitude, patterns and uncertainties of carbon stocks and the effect of land use on the stocks remain poorly quantified. Here we show, using state-of-the-art datasets, that vegetation currently stores around 450 petagrams of carbon. In the hypothetical absence of land use, potential vegetation would store around 916 petagrams of carbon, under current climate conditions. This difference highlights the massive effect of land use on biomass stocks. Deforestation and other land-cover changes are responsible for 53–58% of the difference between current and potential biomass stocks. Land management effects (the biomass stock changes induced by land use within the same land cover) contribute 42–47%, but have been underestimated in the literature. Therefore, avoiding deforestation is necessary but not sufficient for mitigation of climate change. Our results imply that trade-offs exist between conserving carbon stocks on managed land and raising the contribution of biomass to raw material and energy supply for the mitigation of climate change. Efforts to raise biomass stocks are currently verifiable only in temperate forests, where their potential is limited. By contrast, large uncertainties hinder verification in the tropical forest, where the largest potential is located, pointing to challenges for the upcoming stocktaking exercises under the Paris agreement.
Subfields: Global and Planetary Change
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/fe1b757daef3f04025ddee487855dadfae8a0878
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In Global and Planetary Change
Citations in the corpus
- Pervasive human-driven decline of life on Earth points to the need for transformative change (2019, neutral): “The biomass of the world’s vegetation (25) has halved over human history, and forests now span only 68% of their preindustrial extent”
- Understanding the value and limits of nature-based solutions to climate change and other global challenges (2020, background): “Decreasing sources and increasing sinks of GHGs through terrestrial ecosystem stewardship and improvements in agriculture are widely cited as having the potential to provide around 30% of the CO2 mitigation needed through to 2030 to keep warming to less than 2°C [12,49,50].”
- Earth beyond six of nine planetary boundaries (2023, positive): “Approximately 450 Gt of C is bound up in terrestrial biota, primarily in plants ( 86 ), while only ~6 Gt of C is found in ocean biota ( 87 ).”