Carbon loss from forest degradation exceeds that from deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon

Qin, Yuanwei; Xiao, Xiangming; Wigneron, Jean‐Pierre; Ciais, Philippe; Brandt, Martin; Fan, Lei; Li, Xiaojun; Crowell, Sean; Wu, Xiaocui; Doughty, Russell; Zhang, Yao; Liu, Fang; Sitch, Stephen; Moore, Berrien

doi:10.1038/s41558-021-01026-5

Cited by 231 publications

(159 citation statements)

References 63 publications

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“…The number of active fires in BRA seems to have stayed constant, with peaks during dry years, with CO2 emissions from fires that may be larger and decoupled from decreasing CO2 losses from decreasing deforestation (Aragão et al, 2018). Drought generally causes abnormal CO2 losses in the Brazilian Amazon, of 0.48 GtC yr -1 during the 2010 drought, based on a regional inversion with aircraft CO2 vertical profiles (Gatti et al, 2014) and of 0.25 GtC yr -1 during the extreme El Niño drought of 2015, from above ground biomass loss estimated by satellite vegetation optical depth changes (Qin et al, 2021). (Gatti et al 2021) suggested a substantial source of carbon in the eastern Amazon forest basin driven by fire emissions and loss of forest carbon uptake in dry seasons.…”

Section: Choice Of Example Countries For Analysismentioning

confidence: 99%

Comparing national greenhouse gas budgets reported in UNFCCC inventories against atmospheric inversions

Deng

Ciais

Tzompa-Sosa

et al. 2021

Preprint

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Abstract. In support of the Global Stocktake of the Paris Agreement on Climate change, this study presents a comprehensive framework to process the results of atmospheric inversions in order to make them suitable for evaluating UNFCCC national inventories of land-use carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions and removals, corresponding to the Land Use, Land Use Change and Forestry and waste sectors. We also deduced anthropogenic methane (CH4) emissions regrouped into fossil and agriculture and waste emissions, and anthropogenic nitrous oxide (N2O) emissions from inversions. To compare inversions with national reports, we compiled a new global harmonized database of national emissions and removals from periodical UNFCCC inventories by Annex I countries, and from sporadic and less detailed emissions reports by Non-Annex I countries, given by National Communications and Biennial Update Reports. The method to reconcile inversions with inventories is applied to selected large countries covering 78 % of the global land carbon uptake for CO2, as well as emissions and removals in the land use, land use change and forestry sector, and top-emitters of CH4 and N2O. Our method uses results from an ensemble of global inversions produced by the Global Carbon Project for the three greenhouse gases, with ancillary data. We examine the role of CO2 fluxes caused by lateral transfer processes from rivers and from trade in crop and wood products, and the role of carbon uptake in unmanaged lands, both not accounted for by the rules of inventories. Here we show that, despite a large spread across the inversions, the median of available inversion models points to a larger terrestrial carbon sink than inventories over temperate countries or groups of countries of the Northern Hemisphere like Russia, Canada and the European Union. For CH4, we find good consistency between the inversions assimilating only data from the global in-situ network and those using satellite CH4 retrievals, and a tendency for inversions to diagnose higher CH4 emissions estimates than reported by inventories. In particular, oil and gas extracting countries in Central Asia and the Persian Gulf region tend to systematically report lower emissions compared to those estimated by inversions. For N2O, inversions tend to produce higher anthropogenic emissions than inventories for tropical countries, even when attempting to consider only managed land emissions. In the inventories of many non-Annex I countries, this can be tentatively attributed to either a lack of reporting indirect N2O emissions from atmospheric deposition and from leaching to rivers, or to the existence of natural sources intertwined with managed lands, or to an under-estimation of N2O emission factors for direct agricultural soil emissions. The advantage of inversions is that they provide insights on seasonal and interannual greenhouse gas fluxes anomalies, e.g. during extreme events such as drought or abnormal fire episodes, whereas inventory methods are established to estimate trends and multi-annual changes. As a much denser sampling of atmospheric CO2 and CH4 concentrations by different satellites coordinated into a global constellation is expected in the coming years, the methodology proposed here to compare inversion results with inventory reports could be applied regularly for monitoring the effectiveness of mitigation policy and progress by countries to meet the objective of their pledges.

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Section: Choice Of Example Countries For Analysismentioning

confidence: 99%

Comparing national greenhouse gas budgets reported in UNFCCC inventories against atmospheric inversions

Deng

Ciais

Tzompa-Sosa

et al. 2021

Preprint

Self Cite

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“…Similar or worse scenarios are happening in the Amazon and Atlantic Forest (Junior et al 2021;Rosa et al 2021). This is happening particularly inside Brazil, where recent governmental actions have promoted deforestation and forest fires (Escobar 2019;Amigo 2020;Silva et al 2021;França et al 2021;Qin et al 2021;Vale et al 2021), with record deforestation rates in the Amazon (Junior et al 2021). Although not captured quantitatively at the global analysis (Fig.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 87%

Global Land-Use and Land-Cover Data: Historical, Current and Future Scenarios

Vale

Lima‐Ribeiro

Rocha

2021

Preprint

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Land-use land-cover (LULC) data are important predictors of species occurrence and biodiversity threat. Although there are LULC datasets available for ecologists under current conditions, there is a lack of such data under historical and future climatic conditions. This hinders, for example, projecting niche and distribution models under global change scenarios at different times. The Land Use Harmonization Project (LUH2) is a global terrestrial dataset at 0.25° spatial resolution that provides LULC data from 850 to 2300 for 12 LULC state classes. The dataset, however, is compressed in a file format (NetCDF) that is incompatible with most ecological analysis and intractable for most ecologists. Here we selected and transformed the LUH2 data in order to make it more useful for ecological studies. We provide LULC for every year from 850 to 2100, with data from 2015 on provided under two Shared Socioeconomic Pathways (SSP2 and SSP5). We provide two types of file for each year: separate files with continuous values for each of the 12 LULC state classes, and a single categorical file with all state classes combined. To create the categorical layer, we assigned the state with the highest value in a given pixel among the 12 continuous data. The final dataset provides LULC data for 1251 years that will be of interest for macroecology, ecological niche modeling, global change analysis, and other applications in ecology and conservation. We also provide a description of LUH2 prediction of future LULC change through time.

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“…Although rainfall changes have been driving plant compositional changes within the Amazon (Esquivel-Muelbert et al, 2019), basin-wide dieback is judged as unlikely to occur due to projected climate change alone (Chai et al, 2021). However, as forest degradation is higher than previously quantified (Matricardi et al, 2020;Qin et al, 2021), reaching up to 17% of the Amazon basin, and additionally 18% of the area is already deforested (Bullock et al, 2020), interactions between direct human-induced and climate changes may lead to regime shifts in parts of the Amazon rainforests (e.g., Longo et al, 2020). Events such as the 2015/2016 El Niño caused an extreme and prolonged drought, which fueled extensive and damaging fires.…”

Section: New Evidence Of Changementioning

confidence: 99%

Ten new insights in climate science 2021: a horizon scan

et al. 2021

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Non-technical summaryWe summarize some of the past year's most important findings within climate change-related research. New research has improved our understanding about the remaining options to achieve the Paris Agreement goals, through overcoming political barriers to carbon pricing, taking into account non-CO 2 factors, a well-designed implementation of demand-side and nature-based solutions, resilience building of ecosystems and the recognition that climate change mitigation costs can be justified by benefits to the health of humans and nature alone. We consider new insights about what to expect if we fail to include a new dimension of fire extremes and the prospect of cascading climate tipping elements.

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Carbon loss from forest degradation exceeds that from deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon

Cited by 231 publications

References 63 publications

Comparing national greenhouse gas budgets reported in UNFCCC inventories against atmospheric inversions

Comparing national greenhouse gas budgets reported in UNFCCC inventories against atmospheric inversions

Global Land-Use and Land-Cover Data: Historical, Current and Future Scenarios

Ten new insights in climate science 2021: a horizon scan

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