Changes in land use and management led to a decline in Eastern Europe’s terrestrial carbon sink

Abstract

Land-based mitigation is essential in reducing net carbon emissions. Yet, the attribution of carbon fluxes remains highly uncertain, in particular for the forest-rich region of Eastern Europe (incl. Western Russia). Here we integrate various data sources to show that Eastern Europe accounted for an above-ground biomass carbon sink of ~0.41 gigatons of carbon per year over the period 2010–2019, that is 78% of the entire European carbon sink. We find that this carbon sink is declining, mainly driven by changes in land use and land management, but also by increasing natural disturbances. Based on a random forest model, we show that land use and management changes are main drivers of the declining carbon sink in Eastern Europe, although soil moisture variability is also important. Specifically, the saturation effect of tree regrowth in abandoned agricultural areas, combined with increasing wood harvest removals, particularly in European Russia, contributed to the decrease in the Eastern European carbon sink.

Bioenergy in Europe is unlikely to make a timely contribution to climate change targets

“…that natural land covers are in most cases likely to be more beneficial for biodiversity [84,86,87]. Also, the results presented here demonstrate that large-scale bioenergy implementation in Europe would directly contradict the aims of current EU environmental policy.…”

Estimated changes in carbon stock due to changes in land use around Yogyakarta International Airport

“…Monitoring land use change to regulate environmental sustainability and control the impact of disasters/climate change can be done using geographic information systems and remote sensing image data (Fan et al, 2023;Gabriele et al, 2023;Stagakis et al, 2023). One of the (Molina-Bacca et al, 2023;Winkler et al, 2023). Regulations and restrictions on land use types and the direction of regional/urban development are very important to developing the airport area as an aerotropolis (Luo et al, 2023).…”

“…Industrial development, accelerated economic growth, population growth, increased anthropogenic activity, and urban sprawl in various countries are the causes of massive land use change (Gençay and Durkaya, 2023;Luo et al, 2023;Lyu et al, 2023;Murdiyarso et al, 2023;Swamy et al, 2023). Increased land conversion oriented to economic aspects, on the one hand, can encourage rapid national economic growth and improve welfare, but on the other hand, the impact of land conversion further exacerbates environmental damage, increases temperature, causes various disasters, and threatens human life (Ling et al, 2023;Lyu et al, 2023;Winkler et al, 2023). In addition, the increase in forest and peatland fires and wood needs in various countries are also the cause of increased CO2 release, which contributes to the adverse effects of climate change/global warming (Susilo et al, 2018;Utami and Salim, 2021;Utami et al, 2022;Krisnawati et al, 2023;Muthuri et al, 2023;Shiraishi et al, 2023;Sweeney et al, 2023).…”

Land Use Carbon Emissions or Sink: Research Characteristics, Hotspots and Future Perspectives

“…Some studies focus on the current research status [8][9][10][11][12][13], whereas others focus on research methods from carbon emissions [14][15][16][17][18][19][20][21] or carbon sink [22][23][24][25][26][27]. Moreover, some research noticed the determinants and future carbon emission reduction measures [28][29][30][31]. For example, scholars have explored the relationship between highquality urbanization and energy transition in connecting land use, carbon emissions, and carbon sink [9,17].…”

“…Protecting forests (e.g., preventing wildfires, reducing deforestation) was one of the defenses against climate change. The third one was that, under the vision of carbon neutrality, land carbon management needs to be researched urgently [30,31,92]. Gatti et al suggested that the inadequate implementation of environmental policies led to an increase in carbon emissions from the Amazon rainforest [30].…”