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Historical impacts of grazing on carbon stocks and climate mitigation opportunities

Nature Climate Change volume 14, pages 380–386 (2024)Cite this article

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Abstract

Grazing has been associated with contrasting effects on soil carbon stocks at local scales, but accurate global assessments of its net impact are lacking. Here we conducted a meta-analysis of 1,473 soil carbon observations from grazing studies to quantify global changes in soil carbon stocks due to grazing practices. Our analysis shows that grazing has reduced soil carbon stocks at 1-m depth by 46 ± 13 PgC over the past 60 years. The interplay between grazing intensity and environmental factors explains global variations in soil carbon changes. Maps of optimal grazing intensity indicate that implementing grazing management on 21 million km2 of grazing lands, mainly through decreasing grazing intensity on 75% of lands and increasing it on the rest could result in a potential uptake of 63 ± 18 PgC in vegetation and soils. These results highlight the potential of employing grazing as a climate mitigation strategy.

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Fig. 1: Meta-analysis of the grazing effects on soil carbon stocks across different factors.
Fig. 2: Relationships of grazing-driven soil carbon stock changes with grazing intensity.
Fig. 3: Soil carbon stock changes due to livestock grazing.
Fig. 4: Soil carbon changes due to grazing grouped by ecozones.
Fig. 5: Carbon sequestration potential from grazing optimization.

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Data availability

The two grazing fraction maps used in this study can be obtained from https://boku.ac.at/wiso/sec/data-download and http://www.earthstat.org/cropland-pasture-area-2000/, respectively. The soil carbon stock datasets of SoilGrids 2.0, HWSD and the GSDE are available at https://soilgrids.org/, http://www.fao.org/soils-portal/data-hub/soil-maps-and-databases/harmonized-world-soil-database-v12/en/ and http://www.fao.org/soils-portal/data-hub/soil-maps-and-databases/harmonized-world-soil-database-v12/en/, respectively. The plant biomass maps of harmonized global above and belowground biomass carbon density and the IPCC Tier-1 are available at https://doi.org/10.3334/ORNLDAAC/1763 and https://doi.org/10.15485/1463800, respectively. The collected metadata and maps have been deposited in the Figshare data repository (https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.21972521)75.

Code availability

All data analysis and plotting (including global maps) for this study were performed or created using R v.4.0.5. The code is available at the Figshare data repository (https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.21972521)75.

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Acknowledgements

We sincerely appreciate all the scientists who contribute their precious data for our synthesis study. We thank Z. Luo for providing global BNPP and its uncertainty datasets. This work was supported by the Second Tibetan Plateau Scientific Expedition and Research Program (2019QZKK0606 and 2022QZKK0101) and Science and Technology Major Project of Tibetan Autonomous Region of China (XZ202201ZD0005G01). C.T. acknowledges support from the MIT Climate and Sustainability Consortium (MCSC).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. State Key Laboratory of Tibetan Plateau Earth System, Environment and Resources, Institute of Tibetan Plateau Research, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China

    Shuai Ren, Juan Li, Shanshan Yang & Dan Liu

  2. Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA, USA

    Shuai Ren & César Terrer

  3. University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China

    Shuai Ren

  4. Key Laboratory of Cold Regions Restoration Ecology, Northwest Institute of Plateau Biology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Xining, China

    Yingfang Cao

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  1. Shuai Ren
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Contributions

S.R. conceived the idea for the study, and developed the concept together with C.T. and D.L. S.R. performed the data analysis and wrote the manuscript, with major contributions provided by C.T. All the authors contributed to the discussions and paper revision.

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Correspondence to Shuai Ren, César Terrer or Dan Liu.

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Nature Climate Change thanks Liming Lai, Shawn Leroux and the other, anonymous, reviewer(s) for their contribution to the peer review of this work.

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Extended data

Extended Data Fig. 1 Location of 1,473 soil samples.

Sites are overlaid on the global map of grazing fraction, which is derived from Erb et al.65 and Ramankutty et al.66.

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Supplementary Information

Supplementary discussion, Figs. 1–29, Tables 1–5 and references.

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Supplementary Data

PRISMA checklist for this synthesis that includes detailed contents of the manuscript and other items.

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Ren, S., Terrer, C., Li, J. et al. Historical impacts of grazing on carbon stocks and climate mitigation opportunities. Nat. Clim. Chang. 14, 380–386 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41558-024-01957-9

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