Can Coarse Woody Debris Be Used for Carbon Storage in Open Grazed Woodlands?

Carbonservation with Demonstrated Biodiversity and Carbon Gains: Carbon Can Pay But Biodiversity Must Lead

Land use has a critical role to play in both climate change mitigation and biodiversity conservation, and increasingly there have been calls to integrate policies for concurrently meeting Paris Agreement commitments and the UN decade on ecosystem restoration 2021-2030. Currently however, investment activities have been dominated by climate change mitigation activities, including through the development of carbon markets (both voluntary and compliance markets). Whilst climate change mitigation is to be welcomed, the prioritization of carbon in avoided deforestation and reforestation can lead to suboptimal or negative outcomes for biodiversity. Restoration of degraded native vegetation may provide an opportunity for concurrent production of both carbon and biodiversity benefits, by harnessing existing carbon markets without the need to trade-off biodiversity outcomes. Here we demonstrate that carbon sequestered by restoring degraded temperate woodland can pay the price of the restored biodiversity. This is shown using conservative carbon prices in an established market (during both a voluntary and compliance market phase), and the restoration price revealed by a 10-year conservation incentive payment scheme. When recovery rates are high, market prices for carbon could pay the full price of restoration, with additional independent investment needed in cases where recovery trajectories are slower. Using carbon markets to fund restoration of degraded native vegetation thereby provides a solution for constrained resources and problematic trade-offs between carbon and biodiversity outcomes. Multi-attribute markets offer the potential to greatly increase the extent of restoration for biodiversity conservation, while providing an affordable source of carbon sequestration and enhancing economic benefits to landowners.

Spatiotemporal Assessment of Forest Biomass Carbon Sinks: The Relative Roles of Forest Expansion and Growth in Sichuan Province, China

Spatiotemporal patterns of forest carbon (C) sinks and accurate estimation of such patterns are crucial to sustainable forest management. We combined individual tree biomass equations and a Random Forest algorithm to assess the spatiotemporal changes in biomass C sequestration and to further quantify the relative contributions of forest areal expansion and growth to biomass C sinks in Sichuan Province, China, over the past 25 yr. Forest area and average biomass C density increased from 10.5 million ha and 45.7 Mg C ha in 1988 to 14.2 million ha and 52.3 Mg C ha in 2012. Average C density was generally larger in the north and west of Sichuan Province compared with other regions. The expanded forest area and enhanced C density have jointly led to a rise in total C storage by 54.9% over this period in Sichuan Province. It was estimated that the forest areal expansion has been a larger contributor to C sinks than forest growth in Sichuan Province (69 vs. 31%), especially in the regions of the northwestern high mountains and the hilly country of the Sichuan basin. However, the relative contributions of areal expansion exhibited different trends in five subregions and 15 forest species groups in this province. Our study suggests that it is necessary to develop a new forestry management mode to maintain the long-term health of forest ecosystems in Sichuan Province, which should attach more importance to improving forest quality and selecting tree species in different subregions while increasing forested area in the future.