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CLIMATE CHANGE ECOLOGY

The declining tropical carbon sink

Nature Climate Change volume 11, pages 727–728 (2021)Cite this article

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Observational data from long-term monitoring plots show that the carbon sink of remaining, undisturbed African and Amazonian tropical rainforest is declining. A study now finds that simulations from Earth system models cannot reproduce this decline.

Intact tropical forests are Earth’s largest biodiversity repositories and represent about half of the global terrestrial carbon sink, taking up about 15% of the anthropogenic carbon emissions annually. Tropical forests have been providing this invaluable service for a long time1,2, but this carbon sink is losing its strength, having decreased ~30% since 1990, as shown by long-term forest monitoring3. In contrast to these observations, most models predict a strong increase in the tropical carbon sink4,5, mostly due to the assumption that there will be a strong positive forest growth in response to an elevated atmospheric CO2 concentration (also called the ‘CO2-fertilization effect’). In a new study in Earth’s Future, Koch et al.6 show that Earth system model simulations from the most recent Coupled Model Intercomparison Project (CMIP6) and from its previous edition (CMIP5) do not reproduce observed present-day tropical forest carbon dynamics, particularly an approaching saturation of their carbon sink.

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Fig. 1: The in- and outflow of water in a tank as an analogy for the declining carbon sink observed in tropical forests in the last three decades.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Life Sciences Weihenstephan, Technical University of Munich, Freising, Germany

    Anja Rammig

  2. Center for Meteorological and Climatic Research Applied to Agriculture - CEPAGRI, University of Campinas – UNICAMP, Campinas, Brazil

    David M. Lapola

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  1. Anja Rammig
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  2. David M. Lapola
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Correspondence to Anja Rammig or David M. Lapola.

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Rammig, A., Lapola, D.M. The declining tropical carbon sink. Nat. Clim. Chang. 11, 727–728 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41558-021-01135-1

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