Accounting for the climate benefit of temporary carbon storage in nature.


Journal

Nature communications
ISSN: 2041-1723
Titre abrégé: Nat Commun
Pays: England
ID NLM: 101528555

Informations de publication

Date de publication:
07 Sep 2023
Historique:
received: 12 01 2023
accepted: 25 08 2023
medline: 8 9 2023
pubmed: 8 9 2023
entrez: 7 9 2023
Statut: epublish

Résumé

Nature-based climate solutions can contribute to climate mitigation, but the vulnerability of land carbon to disturbances means that efforts to slow or reverse land carbon loss could result in only temporary storage. The challenge of accounting for temporary storage is a key barrier to the implementation of nature-based climate mitigation strategies. Here we offer a solution to this challenge using tonne-year accounting, which integrates the amount of carbon over the time that it remains in storage. We show that tonne-years of carbon storage are proportional to degree-years of avoided warming, and that a physically based tonne-year accounting metric could effectively quantify and track the climate benefit of temporary carbon storage. If the world can sustain an increasing number of tonne-years alongside rapid fossil fuel CO

Identifiants

pubmed: 37679349
doi: 10.1038/s41467-023-41242-5
pii: 10.1038/s41467-023-41242-5
pmc: PMC10485027
doi:

Types de publication

Journal Article

Langues

eng

Sous-ensembles de citation

IM

Pagination

5485

Informations de copyright

© 2023. Springer Nature Limited.

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Auteurs

H Damon Matthews (HD)

Concordia University, Montreal, QC, Canada. damon.matthews@concordia.ca.

Kirsten Zickfeld (K)

Simon Fraser University, Vancouver, BC, Canada.

Alexander Koch (A)

Simon Fraser University, Vancouver, BC, Canada.
Trove Research, Harpenden, UK.

Amy Luers (A)

Microsoft Corporation, Seattle, WA, USA.

Classifications MeSH