Annual emissions of carbon from land use, land-use change, and forestry from 1850 to 2020
<p>Estimates of the annual emissions of carbon from land use, land-use change, and forestry (LULUCF) are important for constructing global, regional, and national carbon budgets, which in turn help predict future rates of climate change and define potential strategies for mitigation. Here, we...
| Main Authors: | , |
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| Format: | Article |
| Language: | English |
| Published: |
Copernicus Publications
2023-05-01
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| Series: | Earth System Science Data |
| Online Access: | https://essd.copernicus.org/articles/15/2025/2023/essd-15-2025-2023.pdf |
| Summary: | <p>Estimates of the annual emissions of carbon from land use, land-use change, and forestry (LULUCF) are important for constructing global, regional,
and national carbon budgets, which in turn help predict future rates of climate change and define potential strategies for mitigation. Here, we
update a long-term (1850–2020) series of annual national carbon emissions resulting from LULUCF (<a href="https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/U7GHRH">https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/U7GHRH</a>, Houghton and Castanho, 2023), based largely, after
1960, on statistics of land use from the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations (<span class="uri">http://www.fao.org/faostat/en/#data/</span>, FAO, 2021). Those data suggest that rates of
deforestation in the tropics (and thus net emissions of carbon) have decreased over the last 10 years (2011–2020). The data also indicate that the
net loss of tropical forest area was greater than the net gain in agricultural lands, and we explore four alternative explanations for this apparent
forest conversion, one of which is shifting cultivation. We also discuss how opposing trends in recent estimates of tropical deforestation (and
emissions) might be reconciled. The calculated emissions of carbon attributable to LULUCF approximate the anthropogenic component of terrestrial
carbon emissions, but limiting national carbon accounting to the anthropogenic component may also limit the potential for managing carbon on land.</p> |
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| ISSN: | 1866-3508 1866-3516 |