Science – Roebroek et al. (2023): Releasing global forests from human management: How much more carbon could be stored?

Caspar T. J. Roebroek, Gregory Duveiller, Sonia I. Seneviratne, Edouard L. Davin, Alessandro Cescatti IN: Science, Vol 380 (6646), pp. 749-753, DOI: 10.1126/science.add5878

The authors integrated global maps of forest biomass and management with machine learning to show that by removing human intervention, under current climatic conditions and carbon dioxide (CO2) concentration, existing global forests could increase their aboveground biomass by up to 44.1 (error range: 21.0 to 63.0) petagrams of carbon. This is an increase of 15 to 16% over current levels, equating to about 4 years of current anthropogenic CO2 emissions.

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