AsianScientist (Jul. 17, 2011) – The world’s forests remove 2.4 billion tons of carbon per year from the atmosphere – equivalent to one third of current annual fossil fuel emissions – according to new research published this week in the journal Science.
This is the first time volumes of the greenhouse gas absorbed from the atmosphere by tropical, temperate, and boreal forests have been so clearly identified.
“This is really a timely breakthrough with which we can now clearly demonstrate how forests and changes in landscape such as wildfire or forest regrowth impact the removal or release of atmospheric carbon dioxide. What this research tells us is that forests play a much larger role as carbon sinks as a result of tree growth and forest expansion,” said CSIRO co-author Dr. Pep Canadell, who is also the Executive Director of the Global Carbon Project.
The international research team combined data from forest inventories, models, and satellites to construct a profile of forests as major regulators of atmospheric carbon dioxide.
In addition to the large carbon sink, the team found that deforestation is responsible for emitting 2.9 billion tons of carbon per year – an exchange that had not been known in the past because of a lack of data. For comparison, total emissions from fossil fuels are currently above eight billion tons of carbon per year.
The emissions from deforestation are much larger than previously thought, suggesting that the potential benefits of avoiding deforestation through the United Nations-backed Reduced Emissions from Deforestation and Degradation (REDD) scheme may be more significant than previously appreciated, the authors say.
The REDD scheme aims to formulate a financial value for the carbon stored in forests.
A surprising finding of the study was the large capacity of tropical forest re-growth to remove atmospheric carbon dioxide, estimated to be an average of 1.6 billion tons of carbon per year.
The article can be found at: Pan Y et al. (2011) A Large and Persistent Carbon Sink in the World’s Forests.
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Source: CSIRO.
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