Abstract
Carbon emissions from anthropogenic land use (LU) and land use change (LUC) are quantified with a Dynamic Global Vegetation Model for the past and the 21st century following Representative Concentration Pathways (RCPs). Wood harvesting and parallel abandonment and expansion of agricultural land in areas of shifting cultivation are explicitly simulated (gross LUC) based on the Land Use Harmonization (LUH) dataset and a proposed alternative method that relies on minimum input data and generically accounts for gross LUC. Cumulative global LUC emissions are 72 GtC by 1850 and 243 GtC by 2004 and 27–151 GtC for the next 95 yr following the different RCP scenarios. The alternative method reproduces results based on LUH data with full transition information within <0.1 GtC/yr over the last decades and bears potential for applications in combination with other LU scenarios. In the last decade, shifting cultivation and wood harvest within remaining forests including slash each contributed 19% to the mean annual emissions of 1.2 GtC/yr. These factors, in combination with amplification effects under elevated CO2, contribute substantially to future emissions from LUC in all RCPs.
Highlights
Land use (LU) and land use change (LUC) are generally associated with a reduction in vegetation (Baccini et al, 2012; Harris et al, 2012) and, to a varying degree, soil carbon (C) storage (Guo and Gifford, 2002), resulting in carbon emissions to the atmosphere (Watson et al, 2000; McGuire et al, 2001; Houghton et al, 2012)
We focus on the contribution of land turnover and wood harvest to LUC emissions and extend the scope of earlier studies by addressing these effects in all four Representative Concentration Pathways (RCPs) based on the Land Use Harmonization (LUH) dataset
LUC emissions have been increasing in Africa, in tropical and East Asia, as well as in Central and South America during the first part of the 20th century, but levelled off thereafter, showing a declining trend today in Latin America and the Asian regions
Summary
Land use (LU) and land use change (LUC) are generally associated with a reduction in vegetation (Baccini et al, 2012; Harris et al, 2012) and, to a varying degree, soil carbon (C) storage (Guo and Gifford, 2002), resulting in carbon emissions to the atmosphere (Watson et al, 2000; McGuire et al, 2001; Houghton et al, 2012). Parallel expansion and abandonment of agricultural land (shifting cultivation), afforestation, wood harvesting and successive recovery leaves behind a vast area of secondary land where biogeochemical cycling and biogeophysical properties are altered and only regenerate to ‘natural’ conditions on time scales of decades to centuries (Houghton et al, 1983). Such legacy effects codetermine the terrestrial C balance and the human impact on the C cycle, but this complexity is often not or only partly taken into account (Brovkin et al, 2013) due to a lack of information determining the myriad transitions between creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), allowing third parties to copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format and to remix, transform, and build upon the material for any purpose, even commercially, provided the original work is properly cited and states its license
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