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- Title
Protected areas' role in climate-change mitigation.
- Authors
Melillo, Jerry; Lu, Xiaoliang; Kicklighter, David; Reilly, John; Sokolov, Andrei; Cai, Yongxia
- Abstract
Globally, 15.5 million km of land are currently identified as protected areas, which provide society with many ecosystem services including climate-change mitigation. Combining a global database of protected areas, a reconstruction of global land-use history, and a global biogeochemistry model, we estimate that protected areas currently sequester 0.5 Pg C annually, which is about one fifth of the carbon sequestered by all land ecosystems annually. Using an integrated earth systems model to generate climate and land-use scenarios for the twenty-first century, we project that rapid climate change, similar to high-end projections in IPCC's Fifth Assessment Report, would cause the annual carbon sequestration rate in protected areas to drop to about 0.3 Pg C by 2100. For the scenario with both rapid climate change and extensive land-use change driven by population and economic pressures, 5.6 million km of protected areas would be converted to other uses, and carbon sequestration in the remaining protected areas would drop to near zero by 2100.
- Subjects
CLIMATE change mitigation; PROTECTED areas; CARBON cycle; CARBON sequestration; ATMOSPHERIC carbon dioxide &; the environment
- Publication
AMBIO - A Journal of the Human Environment, 2016, Vol 45, Issue 2, p133
- ISSN
0044-7447
- Publication type
Article
- DOI
10.1007/s13280-015-0693-1