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We now live in a 400 parts per million world. Data from the Mauna Loa observatory, Hawaii, suggests carbon dioxide concentration levels are unlikely to consistently fall back below this level in our lifetimes.
Carbon accounting is crucial to efforts to tackle climate change, providing data on where emissions emanate and where they are absorbed. Decision-makers rely on the best information about the earth’s changing sinks and sources as they seek to constrain global emissions.
This collection brings together a selection of multi-disciplinary research and commentary from across the physical and social sciences that explores the major inputs and outputs that comprise the world’s carbon account.
This research presents global baseline estimates of mangrove soil C stocks enabling countries to begin to assess their mangrove soil C stocks and the emissions that might arise from mangrove deforestation.
Long-term records of global carbonyl sulfide levels reveal that terrestrial gross primary production (GPP) increased by around 30% during the twentieth century—a finding that may aid understanding of the connection between GPP growth and climate change.
Low-frequency passive microwave data (L-VOD) allow quantification of biomass change in sub-Saharan Africa between 2010 and 2016, revealing climate-induced carbon losses, particularly in drylands.
Methane fluxes from the stems of Amazonian floodplain trees indicate that the escape of soil gas through wetland trees is the dominant source of methane emissions in the Amazon basin.
The growth rate of global atmospheric CO2 concentration is faster in drier years, independently of temperature; this relationship is underestimated in current carbon cycle models.
It remains unclear whether surface water partial pressure of CO2 (pCO2) in continental shelves tracks with increasing atmospheric pCO2. Here, the authors show that pCO2 in shelf waters lags behind rising atmospheric CO2 in a number of shelf regions, suggesting shelf uptake of atmospheric CO2.
Rivers in the Western Siberian Lowland, the world’s largest peatland, play a significant role in the release of terrestrial carbon to the atmosphere, according to in situ measurements of carbon dioxide emissions from rivers.
The model–inventory discrepancy in net land-use carbon emissions mainly results from conceptual differences in estimating anthropogenic forest sinks. A revised disaggregation of global land model results allows greater comparability with inventories.
Analysis of peatland carbon accumulation over the last millennium and its association with global-scale climate space indicates an ongoing carbon sink into the future, but with decreasing strength as conditions warm.