Abstract
Forests are a substantial terrestrial carbon sink, but anthropogenic changes in land use and climate have considerably reduced the scale of this system 1. Remote-sensing estimates to quantify carbon losses from global forests 2–5 are characterized by considerable uncertainty and we lack a comprehensive ground-sourced evaluation to benchmark these estimates. Here we combine several ground-sourced 6 and satellite-derived approaches 2,7,8 to evaluate the scale of the global forest carbon potential outside agricultural and urban lands. Despite regional variation, the predictions demonstrated remarkable consistency at a global scale, with only a 12% difference between the ground-sourced and satellite-derived estimates. At present, global forest carbon storage is markedly under the natural potential, with a total deficit of 226 Gt (model range = 151–363 Gt) in areas with low human footprint. Most (61%, 139 Gt C) of this potential is in areas with existing forests, in which ecosystem protection can allow forests to recover to maturity. The remaining 39% (87 Gt C) of potential lies in regions in which forests have been removed or fragmented. Although forests cannot be a substitute for emissions reductions, our results support the idea 2,3,9 that the conservation, restoration and sustainable management of diverse forests offer valuable contributions to meeting global climate and biodiversity targets.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Pages (from-to) | 92-101 |
| Number of pages | 10 |
| Journal | Nature |
| Volume | 624 |
| Issue number | 7990 |
| Early online date | 13 Nov 2023 |
| DOIs | |
| Publication status | Published - 7 Dec 2023 |
Bibliographical note
Funding Information:We sincerely acknowledge S. Lewis and D. S. Maynard for their valuable suggestions and contributions to this project. This work was supported by grants to L. Mo from the China Scholarship Council, C.M.Z. from the SNF Ambizione Fellowship programme (#PZ00P3_193646) and T.W.C. from DOB Ecology and the Bernina Foundation. We thank RESTOR (www.restor.eco) for providing data and Google Earth Engine for analytical support. This study was in part supported by the ESA Climate Change Initiative Biomass project funded by the European Space Agency (4000123662/18/I-NB) and the Open-Earth-Monitor Project funded by the European Union. The GEO-TREES initiative (https://geo-trees.org/) contributed plot data to this study, supported by the European Space Agency, IIASA, RAINFOR, AfriTRON, ForestPlots.net, ForestGEO, Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute, TmFO, Universite de Toulouse, University of Leeds, UCL and CIRAD. The French National Forest Inventory data were downloaded by the Global Forest Biodiversity initiative (GFBI) at https://inventaire-forestier.ign.fr/dataifn/ ; the Italian Forest Inventory data were downloaded by the GFBI at https://inventarioforestale.org/. O. Bouriaud acknowledges funding from the Romanian National Council for Higher Education Funding, CNFIS, project number CNFIS-FDI-2023-F-0579. J.-C.S. considers this work a contribution to Center for Ecological Dynamics in a Novel Biosphere (ECONOVO), funded by the Danish National Research Foundation (grant DNRF173) and his VILLUM Investigator project ‘Biodiversity Dynamics in a Changing World’, funded by VILLUM FONDEN (grant 16549). ForestPlots.net and RAINFOR contributions led by O.L.P. were supported by several sources, including the Royal Society (GCRF International Collaboration Award ICA\R1\180100), the European Research Council (Advanced Grant 291585), the UK Natural Environment Research Council (NE/B504630/1, NE/D010306/1, NE/G012067/1, NE/D005590/1, NE/I028122/1, NE/S011811/1) and the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation. The exploratory plots of FunDivEUROPE were established through funding from the European Union Seventh Framework Programme FP7/2007-2013 under grant 265171. T.M.F. was supported by a Czech Science Foundation Standard Grant (21-06446 S). We thank the FCT - Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology, project UIDB/04033/2020 and ICNF-Instituto da Conservação da Natureza, Portugal, National Forest Inventory for support. This study used GFBI plot data originally collected in Brazil with funding by Conselho Nacional de Desenvolvimento Científico e Tecnológico (CNPq) (project 520053/1998-2). We are grateful to all the ministries and agencies from the Government of Spain that supported the collection, compilation and coordination of forest inventory data, also including the Spanish Forest Inventories. S.d.M. was supported by the Serra Húnter fellowship provided by the Government of Catalonia (Generalitat de Catalunya). C. Ammer and P. Schall thank the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) Priority Program 1374 Biodiversity Exploratories. We acknowledge the use of data drawn from the Natural Forest plot data collected between January 2009 and March 2014 by the LUCAS programme for the New Zealand Ministry for the Environment. Data were sourced through the NZ National Vegetation Survey (NVS) Databank. Data from T.R.F. was supported by NERC (NE/W001691/1, NE/N011570/1, NE/R017980/1).
Publisher Copyright:
© 2023, The Author(s).
