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Diagnosing destabilization risk in global land carbon sinks

Nature volume 615, pages 848–853 (2023)Cite this article

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Abstract

Global net land carbon uptake or net biome production (NBP) has increased during recent decades1. Whether its temporal variability and autocorrelation have changed during this period, however, remains elusive, even though an increase in both could indicate an increased potential for a destabilized carbon sink2,3. Here, we investigate the trends and controls of net terrestrial carbon uptake and its temporal variability and autocorrelation from 1981 to 2018 using two atmospheric-inversion models, the amplitude of the seasonal cycle of atmospheric CO2 concentration derived from nine monitoring stations distributed across the Pacific Ocean and dynamic global vegetation models. We find that annual NBP and its interdecadal variability increased globally whereas temporal autocorrelation decreased. We observe a separation of regions characterized by increasingly variable NBP, associated with warm regions and increasingly variable temperatures, lower and weaker positive trends in NBP and regions where NBP became stronger and less variable. Plant species richness presented a concave-down parabolic spatial relationship with NBP and its variability at the global scale whereas nitrogen deposition generally increased NBP. Increasing temperature and its increasing variability appear as the most important drivers of declining and increasingly variable NBP. Our results show increasing variability of NBP regionally that can be mostly attributed to climate change and that may point to destabilization of the coupled carbon–climate system.

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Fig. 1: Global distribution of NBP, NBPPV and NBPAR1 and their trends from 1981 to 2018.
Fig. 2: Regions with concomitantly increasing NBPPV and NBPAR1 present lower NBP and a lower increase of NBP over time.
Fig. 3: Contribution of biodiversity, N deposition, climate and land use to NBP, NBPPV, NBPAR1 and their trends.

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Data availability

Data supporting the findings of this study are available in the following open repositories: CAMS (https://ads.atmosphere.copernicus.eu/cdsapp#!/dataset/cams-global-greenhouse-gas-inversion);CarboScope (http://www.bgc-jena.mpg.de/CarboScope/);and atmospheric CO2 concentration (https://scrippsco2.ucsd.edu/data/atmospheric_co2/).Data from the TRENDY ensembles can be provided on request from https://globalcarbonbudgetdata.org/. Data to perform the statistical analyses, calculations and figures are publicly available at Figshare: https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.17081717.v5. Source data are provided with this paper.

Code availability

Code and data to perform the statistical analyses, calculations and figures are publicly available at Figshare: https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.17081717.v5.

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Acknowledgements

This research was funded by the Spanish Government project PID2019-110521GB-I00, the Fundación Ramón Areces project CIVP20A6621, the Catalan government project SGR2017-1005 and the European Research Council project ERCSyG-2013-610028 IMBALANCE-P. M.F.-M. was supported by a postdoctoral fellowship of the Research Foundation-Flanders (FWO) and by a fellowship from ‘la Caixa’ Foundation (ID 100010434), code LCF/BQ/PI21/11830010. This material is based upon work supported by the National Center for Atmospheric Research, which is a major facility sponsored by the National Science Foundation under Cooperative Agreement No. 1852977. Computing and data storage resources, including the Cheyenne supercomputer (doi:10.5065/D6RX99HX), were provided by the Computational and Information Systems Laboratory (CISL) at NCAR. We acknowledge the Scripps CO2 programme for providing the records of atmospheric CO2.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. PLECO (Plants and Ecosystems), Department of Biology, University of Antwerp, Wilrijk, Belgium

    Marcos Fernández-Martínez, Sara Vicca & Ivan A. Janssens

  2. CREAF, Campus de Bellaterra (UAB), Cerdanyola del Vallès, Spain

    Marcos Fernández-Martínez, Josep Peñuelas & Jordi Sardans

  3. BEECA-UB, Department of Evolutionary Biology, Ecology and Environmental Sciences, University of Barcelona, Barcelona, Spain

    Marcos Fernández-Martínez

  4. CSIC, Global Ecology Unit, CREAF-CSIC-UAB, Bellaterra, Barcelona, Spain

    Josep Peñuelas & Jordi Sardans

  5. Laboratoire des Sciences du Climat et de l’Environnement, LSCE/IPSL, CEA-CNRS-UVSQ, Université Paris-Saclay, Gif-sur-Yvette, France

    Frederic Chevallier, Philippe Ciais, Hui Yang & Daniel S. Goll

  6. International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA), Laxenburg, Austria

    Michael Obersteiner

  7. School of Geography and the Environment, University of Oxford, Oxford, UK

    Michael Obersteiner

  8. Department of Biogeochmical Systems, Max Planck Institute for Biogeochemistry, Jena, Germany

    Christian Rödenbeck

  9. College of Life and Environmental Sciences, University of Exeter, Exeter, UK

    Stephen Sitch

  10. College of Engineering, Mathematics, and Physical Sciences, University of Exeter, Exeter, UK

    Pierre Friedlingstein

  11. Canadian Centre for Climate Modelling and Analysis, Climate Research Division, Environment and Climate Change Canada, Victoria, BC, Canada

    Vivek K. Arora

  12. Department of Atmospheric Sciences, University of Illinois, Urbana, IL, USA

    Atul K. Jain

  13. Climate and Global Dynamics Laboratory, National Center for Atmospheric Research, Boulder, CO, USA

    Danica L. Lombardozzi

  14. Department of Meteorology, Department of Geography & Environmental Science, National Centre for Atmospheric Science, University of Reading, Reading, UK

    Patrick C. McGuire

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  1. Marcos Fernández-Martínez
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Contributions

M.F.-M., J.P. and I.A.J. planned and designed the research. F.C., C.R., S.S., P.F., V.A., D.G., A.K.J., D.L.L. and P.C.M. provided the data. M.F.-M. analysed the data. All previously mentioned authors, along with P.C., M.O., J.S., S.V. and H.Y., contributed substantially to the writing of the manuscript.

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Correspondence to Marcos Fernández-Martínez.

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Fernández-Martínez, M., Peñuelas, J., Chevallier, F. et al. Diagnosing destabilization risk in global land carbon sinks. Nature 615, 848–853 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-023-05725-1

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