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The Enduring World Forest Carbon Sink
A new study published in Nature provides insights into the development of the global forest carbon sink over three decades.Pan, Y., Birdsey, R.A., Phillips, O.L. et al. The enduring world forest carbon sink. Nature 631, 563–569 (2024).
"Because forests are the dominant component of the land carbon sink, we need to know how much atmospheric carbon the world's forests have been sequestering, where it is stored and whether recent trends are consistent with the desired strengthening of Earth's land sink," said the authors of the study.
To do so, the international and multidisciplinary team, led by the US Forest Service and including IUFRO officeholders, analyzed several decades of data from the global forest community, combining this with forest area estimates from remote sensing in national forest inventories and other types of land surveys.
They found that the total amount of carbon stashed in the planet's forests was steady in the 1990s and 2000s, and slightly smaller in the 2010s.
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