Nature – Pan et al. (2024): The enduring world forest carbon sink

Yude Pan, Richard A. Birdsey, Oliver L. Phillips, Richard A. Houghton, Jingyun Fang, Pekka E. Kauppi, Heather Keith, Werner A. Kurz, Akihiko Ito, Simon L. Lewis, Gert-Jan Nabuurs, Anatoly Shvidenko, Shoji Hashimoto, Bas Lerink, Dmitry Schepaschenko, Andrea Castanho, Daniel Murdiyarso IN: Nature, https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-024-07602-x

To provide a ground-based long-term assessment of the contribution of forests to terrestrial CO₂ uptake, the authors synthesized in situ forest data from boreal, temperate and tropical biomes spanning three decades. They found that the carbon sink in global forests was steady, at 3.6 ± 0.4 Pg C yr⁻¹ in the 1990s and 2000s, and 3.5 ± 0.4 Pg C yr⁻¹ in the 2010s. Despite this global stability, our analysis revealed some major biome-level changes. Carbon sinks have increased in temperate (+30 ± 5%) and tropical regrowth (+29 ± 8%) forests owing to increases in forest area, but they decreased in boreal (−36 ± 6%) and tropical intact (−31 ± 7%) forests, as a result of intensified disturbances and losses in intact forest area, respectively.

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