Nature – Duncanson et al. (2023): The effectiveness of global protected areas for climate change mitigation
L. Duncanson, M. Liang, V. Leitold, J. Armston, S. M. Krishna Moorthy, R. Dubayah, S. Costedoat, B. J. Enquist, L. Fatoyinbo, S. J. Goetz, M. Gonzalez-Roglich, C. Merow, P. R. Roehrdanz, K. Tabor, A. Zvoleff IN: Nature. doi:10.1038/s41467-023-38073-9
The global impact of PAs (Protected areas) on the carbon cycle has not previously been quantified due to a lack of accurate global-scale carbon stock maps. Here the authors used ~412 million lidar samples from NASA’s GEDI mission to estimate a total PA aboveground carbon (C) stock of 61.43 Gt (+/− 0.31), 26% of all mapped terrestrial woody C. Of this total, 9.65 + /− 0.88 Gt of additional carbon was attributed to PA status.