Natural climate solutions provide robust carbon mitigation capacity under future climate change scenarios

Abstract

Natural climate solutions (NCS) are recognized as an important tool for governments to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and remove atmospheric carbon dioxide. Using California as a globally relevant reference, we evaluate the magnitude of biological climate mitigation potential from NCS starting in 2020 under four climate change scenarios. By mid-century NCS implementation leads to a large increase in net carbon stored, flipping the state from a net source to a net sink in two scenarios. Forest and conservation land management strategies make up 85% of all NCS emissions reductions by 2050, with agricultural strategies accounting for the remaining 15%. The most severe climate change impacts on ecosystem carbon materialize in the latter half of the century with three scenarios resulting in California ecosystems becoming a net source of carbon emissions under a baseline trajectory. However, NCS provide a strong attenuating effect, reducing land carbon emissions 41–54% by 2100 with total costs of deployment of 752–777 million USD annually through 2050. Rapid implementation of a portfolio of NCS interventions provides long-term investment in protecting ecosystem carbon in the face of climate change driven disturbances. This open-source, spatially-explicit framework can help evaluate risks to NCS carbon storage stability, implementation costs, and overall mitigation potential for NCS at jurisdictional scales.

Land Use Carbon Emissions or Sink: Research Characteristics, Hotspots and Future Perspectives

“…Some studies focus on the current research status [8][9][10][11][12][13], whereas others focus on research methods from carbon emissions [14][15][16][17][18][19][20][21] or carbon sink [22][23][24][25][26][27]. Moreover, some research noticed the determinants and future carbon emission reduction measures [28][29][30][31]. For example, scholars have explored the relationship between highquality urbanization and energy transition in connecting land use, carbon emissions, and carbon sink [9,17].…”

“…Recent research has analyzed the influencing factors, differences, comparisons and mitigation policies regarding LUCES to understand its relationship to nature, resources, environment, society and technology [33,36]. Marvin et al, (2023) found that the implementation of nature-based climate solutions, such as forests, would contribute 85% of the carbon emission reductions [29]. Climate change had two types of impacts on land use change and carbon emissions.…”

Reforestation done right is a multi-tasking climate solution

“…Reforestation is an essential component of natural climate solutions to help achieve climate goals based on multiple analyses worldwide (Griscom et al, 2017;Bastin et al, 2019;Marvin et al, 2023). This Frontiers contribution makes the argument that to unlock this potential, we must advance the science of "right tree, right place" to a new level of customization for climate resilience, mitigation, and co-benefits such as biodiversity while also strategically using reforestation to enhance fiber supplies to support diverse forest products that offer climate change mitigation benefits.…”

The spatiotemporal domains of natural climate solutions research and strategies for implementation in the Pacific Northwest, USA

“…For example, not all landscapes may be appropriate for NCS projects. Some have competing socioeconomic uses (e.g., forestry, agriculture, and/or indigenous land) (Hasegawa et al, 2018), some are projected to become too dry to sustain growing plant biomass (Marvin et al, 2023), and others are already rich in soil organic carbon (SOC) (Bossio et al, 2020). The variation in land use and resource availability constraints both the technical and realizable potential for C drawdown and permanence because no single NCS method is appropriate for all bioclimatic conditions (Baldocchi et al, 2018).…”

“…Here, we present a geographic-based framework for guiding NCS implementation using soil C stocks (a proxy for belowground sequestration) and projected climate change (a control on future drawdown potential) across multiple ecoregions in the Pacific Northwest (PNW) of the United States. In accordance with a "protect-manage-restore" approach to NCS implementation (Cook-Patton et al, 2021) that also considers future changes in climate (Marvin et al, 2023), the ecoregions considered here provide examples of how sector-specific NCS activities (e.g., forestry and agriculture) can be ranked relative to conservation and thus prioritized to inform decisions.…”