Abstract
The global warming induced by the emission of greenhouse gases, especially the carbon dioxide, has become the global climate and environmental issues. China has been working in the CO2 emission reduction and carbon sinks with the purpose of becoming the carbon-neutral country by 2060. The CO2 capture, utilization and storage (CCUS) technologies and the reforestation technology represented by the Conversion of Cropland to Forestland Program (CCFP) have great potential for sinking CO2 emission. However, the trade-off among CCFP, CCS/CCUS and Water-Energy-Food (WEF) nexus are not well evaluated. In this paper, the remote-sensing data are collected and used to evaluate the sustainability of CCFP by analyzing the variation of land use and land cover (LULC), crop production, etc. The results show that 13.29% of the cropland in 2001 vanished and converted to grassland (8.3%), mosaic cropland (3%) and urban land (0.98%) in 2019, demonstrating that the CCFP is successful in both WEF nexus and carbon sink. The total crop production has increased around 50% between 2001 and 2019, implying that the CCFP will not lead to the food risk during the conversion of croplands into other types of land in China. A sustainable implementation of CCFP and other environmental Payments for Ecosystem Services (PES) policies in 2019–2060 could reach an estimated total growth of 7.462 billion m3 in comparison of that in 2018 and the total plantation forest stock of about 10.852 billion m3 in 2060, with a corresponding minimum CO2 sink of 2.90 billion tons in 2060. The estimated peak of net equivalent CO2 emissions before 2030 is about 11.0 billion tons and could not be reduced to zero by 2060 without the large-scale application of the CCS/CCUS technologies as geological sequestration of CO2. Besides, the application of CCS/CCUS can be beneficial for WEF, e.g., through replacing the water by CO2 during energy production, especially in the shale gas production in the regions with high water risks in China. In one word, CCS/CCUS and CCFP are two decided pathways of carbon sequestration and should be systematically applied to achieve China’s carbon neutrality by 2060.
Highlights
Climate change and global warming lead to serious consequences, such as sea level rise, glacier melting, storms, floods, droughts, etc., threatening humans’ survival and well-being, attracting both the scientific community and the public’s attention
Since carbon dioxide emission depends on the amount of carbon escaped from the carbon cycle, there are mainly two ways to reduce the atmospheric carbon dioxide: (1) reduce carbon emission into the atmosphere and (2) enhance the carbon sequestration
Two types of efforts can be made to enhance the carbon sequestration: (1) improve the natural carbon sink by soil, vegetation, and ocean; (2) enhance the capture/sequestration amount of CO2 that are emitted during energy production process
Summary
Climate change and global warming lead to serious consequences, such as sea level rise, glacier melting, storms, floods, droughts, etc., threatening humans’ survival and well-being, attracting both the scientific community and the public’s attention. Various concerns and debates still exist towards the utilization of CCFP for the sustainability and the food security issue linked to the reduction in cropland area caused by the conversion into forests (Xu et al 2006; Rodríguez et al 2016) Another important carbon emission reduction method is the CCS/CCUS technology, which has been widely used in reducing the CO2 emission released from large stationary point sources during the energy production process such as thermal power plants, synthetic ammonia industry, iron and steel plants, cement plants, etc. The trade-offs of CCFP, CCS/CCUS and WEF nexus are mainly between the carbon sequestration itself and food, energy, and water resources. The WEF nexus is applied in the sustainability assessment of CCFP and CCS/CCUS without considering other factors (e.g., geological risk by CCUS, policies and economic sustainability, etc.) by answering the following three questions: (1) How important are CCS/CCUS as geological CO2-sequestration and CCFP as natural carbon sinks for China’s carbon neutrality by 2060? (2) How does the implementation of CCFP affect cropland LULC, crop production, etc., in the WEF nexus? (3) How does the utilization of CCS/CCUS technologies affect water consumption during energy production in the WEF nexus?
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