European Commission, Joint Research Centre (JRC), Ispra, Italy.
Institute for Atmospheric and Climate Science, ETH Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland.
Science. 2023 May 19;380(6646):749-753. doi: 10.1126/science.add5878. Epub 2023 May 18.
Carbon storage in forests is a cornerstone of policy-making to prevent global warming from exceeding 1.5°C. However, the global impact of management (for example, harvesting) on the carbon budget of forests remains poorly quantified. We integrated global maps of forest biomass and management with machine learning to show that by removing human intervention, under current climatic conditions and carbon dioxide (CO) concentration, existing global forests could increase their aboveground biomass by up to 44.1 (error range: 21.0 to 63.0) petagrams of carbon. This is an increase of 15 to 16% over current levels, equating to about 4 years of current anthropogenic CO emissions. Therefore, without strong reductions in emissions, this strategy holds low mitigation potential, and the forest sink should be preserved to offset residual carbon emissions rather than to compensate for present emissions levels.
森林碳储存是防止全球变暖超过 1.5°C 的政策制定的基石。然而，管理（例如，采伐）对森林碳预算的全球影响仍然难以量化。我们整合了森林生物量和管理的全球地图与机器学习，结果表明，在当前气候条件和二氧化碳（CO）浓度下，通过消除人为干预，现有的全球森林可以将其地上生物量增加多达 441 亿公吨的碳（误差范围：210 亿至 630 亿）。这比目前的水平增加了 15% 到 16%，相当于目前人为 CO 排放的 4 年左右。因此，在没有大幅减少排放的情况下，这种策略的减排潜力较低，应该保留森林碳汇来抵消剩余的碳排放，而不是补偿目前的排放水平。
