Balancing trade-offs among multiple ecosystem services (ESs) is critical for restored ecosystem, including the Loess Plateau of China where ESs are undergoing significant changes. In this study, the ESs in Ansai watershed were quantified and analyzed for the period 2000 to 2014 using highresolution and site-specific models. Regression and redundancy analysis were applied to unravel the effects of key drivers on changes in ESs from land use, environmental, and morphological factors and their trade-offs. Results show that soil conservation (SEC) and carbon sequestration (TC) increased by about 20% and 82%, while water yield (WY) declined by 38%. Forest and shrub land are shared drivers of changes in ES, and slope gradient, grassland and construction land were independent drivers. Two major trade-offs were identified, the SEC-WY and TC-WY. Slope gradient and grassland had a dominant influence on the SEC-WY trade-off. Quadratic function relationship is found between slope gradient and this trade-off, which is reduced from declines in forest areas and expanding grassland. Regarding the TC-WY tradeoff, there is a unidirectional interaction, and rRainfall, grassland, farmland, and forest land are shared drivers. Rainfall and forest aggravated the trade-off, grassland restrained it, and construction land is an independent driver. The forest and grassland proportion are the dominant drivers affecting the TC-WY trade-off, and quadratic function relationship is also found between these drivers and the trade-2 off. Overall, forest and grassland proportions need to be controlled at 20-30% and 45-60%, respectively for…. We proposed the mode of ecological restoration, through which the forest patches with more edges can be set to the contiguous grassland matrix,

Around 70 Mha of land cover changes (LCCs) occurred in Europe from 1992 to 2015. Despite LCCs being an important driver of regional climate variations, their temperature effects at a continental scale have not yet been assessed. Here, we integrate maps of historical LCCs with a regional climate model to investigate air temperature and humidity effects. We find an average temperature change of −0.12 ± 0.20°C, with widespread cooling (up to −1.0°C) in western and central Europe in summer and spring. At continental scale, the mean cooling is mainly correlated with agriculture abandonment (cropland-to-forest transitions), but a new approach based on ridge-regression decomposing the temperature change to the individual land transitions shows opposite responses to cropland losses and gains between western and eastern Europe. Effects of historical LCCs on European climate are non-negligible and regionspecific, and ignoring land-climate biophysical interactions may lead to sub-optimal climate change mitigation and adaptation strategies.

Recently, the European Commission has adopted a Circular Economy package. In addition, climate change is regarded as a major global challenge, and the de-carbonization of the energy sector requires a massive transformation that involves an increase of renewable shares in the energy mix and the incorporation of carbon capture and storage (CCS) processes. Given all this strong new momentum, what will the Norwegian waste-to-energy (WtE) look like in a decade? What threats and opportunities are foreseen? In an attempt to answer these questions, this study combines process-based life-cycle assessment with analysis of the overall energy and material balances, mathematical optimization and cost assessment in four scenarios: (1) the current situation of the Norwegian WtE sector, (2) the implications of the circular economy, (3) the addition of CCS on the current WtE system and (4) a landfill scenario. Except for climate change, the CCS scenario performs worse than the WtE scenario. The energy recovering scenarios perform better than the recycling scenario for (1) freshwater eutrophication and human toxicity potentials due to secondary waste streams and (2) ozone depletion potential due to the additional fossil fuel used in the recycling processes. The inclusion of the near-term climate forcers decreases the climate change impacts by 1% to 13% due to a net cooling mainly induced by NOx. Circular economy may actually give the WtE system the opportunity to strengthen and expand its role towards new or little developed value chains such as secondary raw materials production and valorization of new waste streams occurring in material recycling. Keywords 1. Waste-to-Energy (WtE) 2. Life-cycle assessment (LCA) 3. Carbon capture and storage (CCS) 4. Circular economy 5. Climate change 6. Near-term climate forcers

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BackgroundForests and forest products can significantly contribute to climate change mitigation by stabilizing and even potentially decreasing the concentration of carbon dioxide (CO2) in the atmosphere. Harvested wood products (HWP) represent a common widespread and cost-efficient opportunity for negative emissions. After harvest, a significant fraction of the wood remains stored in HWPs for a period that can vary from some months to many decades, whereas atmospheric carbon (C) is immediately sequestered by vegetation re-growth. This temporal mismatch between oxidation of HWPs and C uptake by vegetation generates a net sink that lasts over time. The role of temporary carbon storage in forest products has been analysed and debated in the scientific literature, but detailed bottom-up studies mapping the fate of harvested materials and quantifying the associated emission profiles at national scales are rare. In this work, we quantify the net CO2 emissions and the temporary carbon storage in forest products in Norway, Sweden and Finland for the period 1960–2015, and investigate their correlation. We use a Chi square probability distribution to model the oxidation rate of C over time in HWPs, taking into consideration specific half-lives of each category of products. We model the forest regrowth and estimate the time-distributed C removal. We also integrate the specific HWP flows with an emission inventory database to quantify the associated life-cycle emissions of fossil CO2, CH4 and N2O.ResultsWe find that assuming an instantaneous oxidation of HWPs would overestimate emissions of about 1.18 billion t CO2 (cumulative values for the three countries over the period 1960–2015).We also find that about 40 years after 1960, the starting year of our analysis, are sufficient to detect signs of negative emissions. The total amount of net CO2 emissions achieved in 2015 are about − 3.8 million t CO2, − 27.9 t CO2 and − 43.6 t CO2 in Norway, Sweden, and Finland, respectively.ConclusionWe argue for a more explicit accounting of the actual emission rates from HWPs in carbon balance studies and climate impact analysis of forestry systems and products, and a more transparent inclusion of the potential of HWP as negative emissions in perspective studies and scenarios. Simply assuming that all harvested carbon is instantaneously oxidized can lead to large biases and ultimately overlook the benefits of negative emissions of HWPs.Electronic supplementary materialThe online version of this article (10.1186/s13021-018-0101-9) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.