Dynamics of Biotic Carbon Fluxes under Different Scenarios of Forest Area Changes

Abstract

This paper estimates the global biotic carbon fluxes into the atmosphere under various scenarios of changes in forest area for temperate/boreal and tropical zones. Forestry scenarios have been developed from both national forest land-cover inventories and various estimates for tree vegetation-cover areas derived from the Earth’s remote sensing data for recent decades. Three scenarios have been proposed for changes in the area of temperate/boreal forests: FAOSTAT (a growth scenario on the basis of inventories), CONST (a scenario of maintaining the present level), and LANDSAT (a scenario on the basis of satellite data from different sources). The trend of tropical deforestation is maintained for FAOSTAT and LANDSAT scenarios. Together with GEPL97 (the base scenario published earlier by the authors), these scenarios have been used to obtain model biotic carbon fluxes. A model of the global carbon cycle developed in MPEI and recently updated to take into account anthropogenic carbon emissions (both industrial and related to deforestation/land use) has been used to perform a thorough analysis of the plausible dynamics of biotic carbon sources and sinks. It has been shown that the magnitude and sign of biotic carbon fluxes into the atmosphere depends substantially on the adopted scenario—from preserving the biosphere as an effective sink of excess carbon from the atmosphere in the current century (GEPL97 and CONST) to its turning into an additional source of CO2 (LANDSAT). The FAOSTAT scenario leads to the return of biotic carbon fluxes by 2100 to the modern level. The maximum difference in net carbon fluxes from the biosphere to atmosphere for the scenarios considered here is almost 2.5 Gt C/year and falls approximately on the middle of the current century. The difference between the corresponding CO2 concentrations for these scenarios reaches 65 ppm by 2100.