International collaboration reveals China’s carbon balance

An international team of researchers compiled and verified the recently available data on the country’s CO₂ sink and, for the first time, quantitatively estimated the effect of China’s carbon mitigation efforts.

The researchers published their results on Oct. 28 in Nature.

“China is currently one of the largest CO emitters in the world₂, but China’s forest resources have grown continuously over the past 30 years, “said article author Yi Liu, a professor at the Institute of Atmospheric Physics at the Chinese Academy of Sciences.” In this study, we get a better understanding of CO₂ flows on China “.

Previously, the CO₂ ground monitoring stations above China were few and far between, resulting in CO₂ flow estimates with large uncertainties. A monitoring station could represent a significant area that included distinctly different types of land use. Lack of data has led to fewer CO studies₂ also in China.

“Here lies the heart of the challenge faced by science and political communities: effective mitigation of CO2 from fossil fuels₂ emissions within a large-scale dynamic natural carbon cycle that we don’t understand quantitatively, ”Liu said.

“Without good data, it was nearly impossible to assess how China’s forestry efforts to mitigate CO₂ emissions were actually doing well, “added Jing Wang, lead author of the same institute study.

That changed when the Chinese Meteorological Administration began collecting weekly and hourly continuous atmospheric CO₂ measurements available between 2009 and 2016.

Liu and his team found that, between 2010 and 2016, China reabsorbed about 45 percent of the country’s estimated annual man-made CO2.₂ emissions.

They confirmed that the data with independent satellite remote sensing measurements of green vegetation, availability of water in the soil, observations of the satellite column of CO₂ and forest censuses.

“While our results still have great uncertainties, it is clear that China’s forest ecosystem has a huge carbon sequestration effect,” said article author Paul I. Palmer of the University of Edinburgh’s School of GeoSciences. in the UK.

The researchers plan to fine-tune their results with more terrestrial and satellite data, with the ultimate goal of improving their calculation methods to be able to determine the carbon balance of smaller areas, such as cities.