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Climate change 2007

Spring-time for sinks

Nature volume 446, pages 727–728 (2007)Cite this article

Carbon sinks play a key role in slowing the growth of carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere. These sinks are at risk as the world warms, but their demise is not inevitable, say Dave Reay and his colleagues.

With longer growing seasons and earlier spring 'greening', the amount of carbon accumulating in the terrestrial biosphere increased from 0.2 ± 0.7 billion tonnes per annum in the 1980s to 1.4 ± 0.7 billion tonnes in the 1990s. But if the terrestrial carbon sink has played a part in slowing the rate of recent CO2 increase, the oceanic carbon sink — which mops up twice as much anthropogenic carbon as the land sink — has been even more crucial. Together, these sinks sequester around half of the 6.4 billion tonnes of anthropogenic carbon emitted each year. As such, they are key to determining how rapidly atmospheric CO2 concentrations, and so global temperatures, will increase during the twenty-first century.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Dave Reay is at the School of GeoSciences, University of Edinburgh, West Mains Road, Edinburgh EH9 3JN, UK David.Reay@ed.ac.uk,

    Dave Reay

  2. Christopher Sabine is at the NOAA Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory,

    Christopher Sabine

  3. Pete Smith is at the University of Aberdeen,

    Pete Smith

  4. Graham Hymus is at Northern Arizona University.,

    Graham Hymus

Authors
  1. Dave Reay
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  2. Christopher Sabine
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  3. Pete Smith
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  4. Graham Hymus
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Reay, D., Sabine, C., Smith, P. et al. Spring-time for sinks. Nature 446, 727–728 (2007). https://doi.org/10.1038/446727a

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