Regrowing tropical forests absorb megatonnes of carbon

Zuidema, Pieter A.; Jakovac, Catarina C.

doi:10.1038/d41586-023-00706-w

NEWS AND VIEWS
15 March 2023

Regrowing tropical forests absorb megatonnes of carbon

An analysis confirms that humid tropical forests recovering from degradation and deforestation absorb substantial amounts of carbon dioxide — but much less than is emitted by the destruction of the original forests.

Pieter A. Zuidema⁰ &
Catarina C. Jakovac¹

Pieter A. Zuidema
1. Pieter A. Zuidema is in the Forest Ecology and Forest Management group, Wageningen University & Research, 6700 Wageningen, the Netherlands.
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Catarina C. Jakovac
1. Catarina C. Jakovac is in the Department of Plant Sciences, Federal University of Santa Catarina, 88034-000 Florianópolis, Brazil.
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An enormous amount of carbon dioxide is likely to be sequestered in humid tropical forests that are recovering from human-induced disturbances, but an estimate that encompasses all of the planet’s tropical zones has been missing. In a paper in Nature, Heinrich et al.¹ fill this gap using a new approach that analyses satellite data. For the three major regions of humid tropical forest on Earth — the Amazon Basin in South America, Central Africa’s Congo Basin and Borneo — the authors estimate rates of recovery after deforestation, and quantify the associated uptake of carbon between 1984 and 2018. They find that regrowing forests sequester large amounts of carbon, and that this process might have mitigated about one-quarter of the emissions that originally occurred as a result of forest loss and degradation.

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Nature 615, 398-399 (2023)

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-023-00706-w

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