Annual emissions of carbon from land use, land-use change, and forestry from 1850 to 2020
Abstract Estimates of the annual emissions of carbon from land use, land-use change, and forestry (LULUCF) are important for constructing global, regional, and national carbon budgets, which in turn help predict future rates of climate change and define potential strategies for mitigation. Here, we update a long-term (1850–2020) series of annual national carbon emissions resulting from LULUCF (10.7910/DVN/U7GHRH, Houghton and Castanho, 2023), based largely, after 1960, on statistics of land use from the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations (http://www.fao.org/faostat/en/#data/, FAO, 2021). Those data suggest that rates of deforestation in the tropics (and thus net emissions of carbon) have decreased over the last 10 years (2011–2020). The data also indicate that the net loss of tropical forest area was greater than the net gain in agricultural lands, and we explore four alternative explanations for this apparent forest conversion, one of which is shifting cultivation. We also discuss how opposing trends in recent estimates of tropical deforestation (and emissions) might be reconciled. The calculated emissions of carbon attributable to LULUCF approximate the anthropogenic component of terrestrial carbon emissions, but limiting national carbon accounting to the anthropogenic component may also limit the potential for managing carbon on land.
- Location
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Deutsche Nationalbibliothek Frankfurt am Main
- Extent
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Online-Ressource
- Language
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Englisch
- Bibliographic citation
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Annual emissions of carbon from land use, land-use change, and forestry from 1850 to 2020 ; volume:15 ; number:5 ; year:2023 ; pages:2025-2054 ; extent:30
Earth system science data ; 15, Heft 5 (2023), 2025-2054 (gesamt 30)
- Classification
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Natürliche Ressourcen, Energie und Umwelt
- Creator
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Houghton, Richard A.
Castanho, Andrea
- DOI
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10.5194/essd-15-2025-2023
- URN
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urn:nbn:de:101:1-2023052504181753313539
- Rights
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Open Access; Der Zugriff auf das Objekt ist unbeschränkt möglich.
- Last update
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14.08.2025, 10:50 AM CEST
Data provider
Deutsche Nationalbibliothek. If you have any questions about the object, please contact the data provider.
Associated
- Houghton, Richard A.
- Castanho, Andrea
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Annual emissions of carbon from land use, land-use change, and forestry 1850–2020
Country-level estimates of gross and net carbon fluxes from land use, land-use change and forestry
Foreign direct investment and carbon emissions from land use, land-use change, and forestry (LULUCF): empirical evidence from tropical forest countries
Uncertainties in the land-use flux resulting from land-use change reconstructions and gross land transitions
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INCORPORATING LAND-USE MAPPING UNCERTAINTY IN REMOTE SENSING BASED CALIBRATION OF LAND-USE CHANGE MODELS
Annual emissions of carbon from land use, land-use change, and forestry 1850–2020
Country-level estimates of gross and net carbon fluxes from land use, land-use change and forestry
Foreign direct investment and carbon emissions from land use, land-use change, and forestry (LULUCF): empirical evidence from tropical forest countries
Uncertainties in the land-use flux resulting from land-use change reconstructions and gross land transitions
Modelling land use, land-use change, and forestry in climate change: A review of major approaches
Automatic derivation of land-use from topographic data
Land-use legacies of twentieth-century forestry in the UK: a perspective
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Can we reconcile differences in estimates of carbon fluxes from land-use change and forestry for the 1990s?
Dynamics of Indirect Land-Use Change: Empirical Evidence from Brazil
Modelling of residential land-use, in a joint framework of land-use, transport and economy