Carbon reservoirs: three quarters of crucial ecosystems are not protected

Ecosystems such as forests and peatlands are vital stores of carbon, but less than a quarter of these areas globally have protected status

By Chen Ly

Only 23% of Earth’s most vulnerable and crucial carbon-storage ecosystems are in protected areas. But a study that identifies these carbon pools could help inform initiatives to protect them from development, while protecting biodiversity.

Our planet stores carbon in a range of ecosystems, such as forests and peatlands. When humans degrade these ecosystems for commercial purposes, such as agriculture, large amounts of carbon can be released into the atmosphere, contributing to global warming.

Once released, it can take years, centuries or even millennia for the carbon to be stored again in these ecosystems. Carbon that cannot be recovered by 2050, when the world must reach net zero emissions to avoid the worst impacts of climate change, is known as sunk carbon.

To map areas of unrecoverable carbon globally, Monica Noon of Conservation International, a Virginia-based environmental charity, and her colleagues put together several carbon storage datasets.

They found that half of the planet’s unrecoverable carbon is stored on just 3.3% of its land. The highest concentrations of unrecoverable carbon stores are found in peatlands and forests in the Amazon and Congo basin, forests in North America and Siberia, and in mangroves and wetlands elsewhere. Less than a quarter of this land is under protected status.

By identifying unrecoverable carbon hotspots, Noon hopes to encourage better nature-based solutions to combat climate change and policies to manage and protect these crucial carbon storage ecosystems.

In the short term, this could include paying governments to reduce deforestation. In the long term, this could mean strengthening the rights of indigenous peoples, who care for more than a third of the land containing irretrievable carbon, and financing the expansion of protected areas around the world.

“Eighty-seven percent of biodiversity overlaps with areas of high unrecoverable carbon, which means we can realistically protect areas and kind of have a win-win situation when we look at biodiversity and the environment. climate,” says Noon.

Journal reference: Natural durabilityDOI: 10.1038/s41893-021-00803-6