Historical CO₂ emissions from land use and land cover change and their uncertainty

Abstract

Emissions from land use and land cover change are a key component of the global carbon cycle. However, models are required to disentangle these emissions from the land carbon sink, as only the sum of both can be physically observed. Their assessment within the yearly community-wide effort known as the “Global Carbon Budget” remains a major difficulty, because it combines two lines of evidence that are inherently inconsistent: bookkeeping models and dynamic global vegetation models. Here, we propose a unifying approach that relies on a bookkeeping model, which embeds processes and parameters calibrated on dynamic global vegetation models, and the use of an empirical constraint. We estimate that the global CO2 emissions from land use and land cover change were 1.36±0.42 PgC yr−1 (1σ range) on average over the 2009–2018 period and reached a cumulative total of 206±57 PgC over the 1750–2018 period. We also estimate that land cover change induced a global loss of additional sink capacity – that is, a foregone carbon removal, not part of the emissions – of 0.68±0.57 PgC yr−1 and 32±23 PgC over the same periods, respectively. Additionally, we provide a breakdown of our results' uncertainty, including aspects such as the land use and land cover change data sets used as input and the model's biogeochemical parameters. We find that the biogeochemical uncertainty dominates our global and regional estimates with the exception of tropical regions in which the input data dominates. Our analysis further identifies key sources of uncertainty and suggests ways to strengthen the robustness of future Global Carbon Budget estimates.