Harmonising the Land-Use Flux Estimates of Global Models and National Inventories for 2000–2020

• Published in: Earth system science data 2023-03, Vol.15 (3), p.1093-1114
• Main Authors: Grassi, Giacomo, Schwingshackl, Clemens, Gasser, Thomas, Houghton, Richard A., Sitch, Stephen, Canadell, Josep G., Cescatti, Alessandro, Ciais, Philippe, Federici, Sandro, Friedlingstein, Pierre, Kurz, Werner A., Sanchez, Maria J. Sanz, Viñas, Raúl Abad, Alkama, Ramdane, Bultan, Selma, Ceccherini, Guido, Falk, Stefanie, Kato, Etsushi, Kennedy, Daniel, Knauer, Jürgen, Korosuo, Anu, Melo, Joana, McGrath, Matthew J., Nabel, Julia E. M. S., Poulter, Benjamin, Romanovskaya, Anna A., Rossi, Simone, Tian, Hanqin, Walker, Anthony P., Yuan, Wenping, Yue, Xu, Pongratz, Julia
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Air pollution; Analysis; Anthropogenic factors; Atmospheric models; Carbon; Carbon budget; Carbon cycle (Biogeochemistry); Carbon dioxide; Carbon footprint; Climate change; Climate change mitigation; Climate policy; Deforestation; Disaggregation; Earth Resources and Remote Sensing; Emission inventories; Emissions; Environmental changes; Environmental policy; ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCES; Estimates; Fertilization; Fire prevention; Fluxes; Forest management; Forests; Global temperature changes; Greenhouse gases; Harvest; Human influences; Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change; Inventories; Land use; Mitigation; Modelling; Organic soils; Paris Agreement; Reconciliation; Soils; Vegetation; Vegetation effects; Vegetation growth
• ISSN: 1866-3508; 1866-3516; 1866-3516
• DOI: 10.5194/essd-15-1093-2023

As the focus of climate policy shifts from pledges to implementation, there is a growing need to track progress on climate change mitigation at the country level, particularly for the land-use sector. Despite new tools and models providing unprecedented monitoring opportunities, striking differences remain in estimations of anthropogenic land-use CO2 fluxes between, on the one hand, the national greenhouse gas inventories (NGHGIs) used to assess compliance with national climate targets under the Paris Agreement and, on the other hand, the Global Carbon Budget and Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) assessment reports, both based on global bookkeeping models (BMs). Recent studies have shown that these differences are mainly due to inconsistent definitions of anthropogenic CO2 fluxes in managed forests. Countries assume larger areas of forest to be managed than BMs do, due to a broader definition of managed land in NGHGIs. Additionally, the fraction of the land sink caused by indirect effects of human-induced environmental change (e.g. fertilisation effect on vegetation growth due to increased atmospheric CO2 concentration) on managed lands is treated as non-anthropogenic by BMs but as anthropogenic in most NGHGIs. We implement an approach that adds the CO2 sink caused by environmental change in countries' managed forests (estimated by 16 dynamic global vegetation models, DGVMs) to the land-use fluxes from three BMs. This sum is conceptually more comparable to NGHGIs and is thus expected to be quantitatively more similar. Our analysis uses updated and more comprehensive data from NGHGIs than previous studies and provides model results at a greater level of disaggregation in terms of regions, countries and land categories (i.e. forest land, deforestation, organic soils, other land uses). Our results confirm a large difference (6.7 GtCO2 yr−1) in global land-use CO2 fluxes between the ensemble mean of the BMs, which estimate a source of 4.8 GtCO2 yr−1 for the period 2000–2020, and NGHGIs, which estimate a sink of −1.9 GtCO2 yr−1 in the same period. Most of the gap is found on forest land (3.5 GtCO2 yr−1), with differences also for deforestation (2.4 GtCO2 yr−1), for fluxes from other land uses (1.0 GtCO2 yr−1) and to a lesser extent for fluxes from organic soils (0.2 GtCO2 yr−1). By adding the DGVM ensemble mean sink arising from environmental change in managed forests (−6.4 GtCO2 yr−1) to BM estimates, the gap between BMs and NGHGIs becomes subst