Projected soil carbon loss with warming in constrained Earth system models

Shuai Ren; Tao Wang; Bertrand Guenet; Dan Liu; Yingfang Cao; Jinzhi Ding; Pete Smith; Shilong Piao

doi:10.1038/s41467-023-44433-2

Projected soil carbon loss with warming in constrained Earth system models

Shuai Ren, Tao Wang, Bertrand Guenet, Dan Liu, Yingfang Cao, Jinzhi Ding, Pete Smith, Shilong Piao

Aberdeen Centre For Environmental Sustainability

Research output: Contribution to journal › Article › peer-review

Abstract

The soil carbon-climate feedback is currently the least constrained component of global warming projections, and the major source of uncertainties stems from a poor understanding of soil carbon turnover processes. Here, we assemble data from long-term temperature-controlled soil incubation studies to show that the arctic and boreal region has the shortest intrinsic soil carbon turnover time while tropical forests have the longest one, and current Earth system models overestimate intrinsic turnover time by 30 percent across active, slow and passive carbon pools. Our constraint suggests that the global soils will switch from carbon sink to source, with a loss of 0.22-0.53 petagrams of carbon per year until the end of this century from strong mitigation to worst emission scenarios, suggesting that global soils will provide a strong positive carbon feedback on warming. Such a reversal of global soil carbon balance would lead to a reduction of 66% and 15% in the current estimated remaining carbon budget for limiting global warming well below 1.5 °C and 2 °C, respectively, rendering climate mitigation much more difficult.

Original language	English
Article number	102
Number of pages	10
Journal	Nature Communications
Volume	15
Issue number	1
DOIs	https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-023-44433-2
Publication status	Published - 2 Jan 2024

Bibliographical note

This study was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (42230411), the NSFC project Basic Science Centre for Tibetan Plateau Earth System (41988101), the Second Tibetan Plateau Scientific Expedition and Research Program (2019QZKK0606), the Science and Technology Plan Project of Tibet Autonomous Region (XZ202201ZY0015G), and Innovation Program for Young Scholars of TPESER (TPESER-QNCX2022ZD-02). We also acknowledge the support of Kathmandu Center for Research and Education, Chinese Academy of Sciences—Tribhuvan University.

Data Availability Statement

Data availability
The outputs of the Earth system models can be downloaded from the CMIP6 website (https://esgf-node.llnl.gov/projects/cmip6/). The WorldClim and CRU climate data are available at http://www.worldclim.com/version2 and https://crudata.uea.ac.uk/cru/data/hrg/, respectively. Soil physicochemical attributes of the GSDE and SoilGrids data sets can be obtained from http://globalchange.bnu.edu.cn/research/soilw and https://soilgrids.org/, respectively. The soil carbon content of HWSD can be obtained from http://www.fao.org/soils-portal/data-hub/soil-maps-and-databases/harmonized-world-soil-database-v12/en/. The global NPP databases of MODIS and GIMMS3g are available at http://files.ntsg.umt.edu/data/NTSG_Products/MOD17/ and https://wkolby.org/data-code/, respectively. The collected metadata and gridded maps of soil τi and fractions of different carbon pools have been deposited in the Figshare data repository (https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.19641759.v1)66. Source data are provided with this paper.

Code availability
Data analysis was carried out using R v.4.0.5 and MATLAB R2016a. The code used in this study is available at the Figshare data repository (https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.19641759.v1)66.

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Data From: Projected soil carbon loss with warming in constrained Earth system models
Smith, P. (Creator), Ren, S. (Creator), Ren, S. (Creator), Wang, T. (Creator), Guenet, B. (Creator), Liu, D. (Creator), Yingfang, C. (Creator), Ding, J. (Creator) & Piao, S. (Creator), University of Aberdeen, Jan 2024
Dataset
Data from Projected soil carbon loss with warming in constrained Earth system models
Ren, S. (Creator), Wang, T. (Creator), Guenet, B. (Creator), Liu, D. (Creator), Yingfang, C. (Creator), Ding, J. (Creator), Smith, P. (Creator) & Piao, S. (Creator), University of Aberdeen, 2 Jan 2024
DOI: 10.1038/s41467-023-44433-2, https://static-content.springer.com/esm/art%3A10.1038%2Fs41467-023-44433-2/MediaObjects/41467_2023_44433_MOESM3_ESM.pdf
Dataset
Dataset From: Data and code for "Projected soil carbon loss with warming in constrained Earth system models"
Smith, P. (Owner), University of Aberdeen, 7 Dec 2023
DOI: doi.org/10.1038/s41467-023-44433-2
Dataset

Cite this

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abstract = "The soil carbon-climate feedback is currently the least constrained component of global warming projections, and the major source of uncertainties stems from a poor understanding of soil carbon turnover processes. Here, we assemble data from long-term temperature-controlled soil incubation studies to show that the arctic and boreal region has the shortest intrinsic soil carbon turnover time while tropical forests have the longest one, and current Earth system models overestimate intrinsic turnover time by 30 percent across active, slow and passive carbon pools. Our constraint suggests that the global soils will switch from carbon sink to source, with a loss of 0.22-0.53 petagrams of carbon per year until the end of this century from strong mitigation to worst emission scenarios, suggesting that global soils will provide a strong positive carbon feedback on warming. Such a reversal of global soil carbon balance would lead to a reduction of 66% and 15% in the current estimated remaining carbon budget for limiting global warming well below 1.5 °C and 2 °C, respectively, rendering climate mitigation much more difficult.",

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N2 - The soil carbon-climate feedback is currently the least constrained component of global warming projections, and the major source of uncertainties stems from a poor understanding of soil carbon turnover processes. Here, we assemble data from long-term temperature-controlled soil incubation studies to show that the arctic and boreal region has the shortest intrinsic soil carbon turnover time while tropical forests have the longest one, and current Earth system models overestimate intrinsic turnover time by 30 percent across active, slow and passive carbon pools. Our constraint suggests that the global soils will switch from carbon sink to source, with a loss of 0.22-0.53 petagrams of carbon per year until the end of this century from strong mitigation to worst emission scenarios, suggesting that global soils will provide a strong positive carbon feedback on warming. Such a reversal of global soil carbon balance would lead to a reduction of 66% and 15% in the current estimated remaining carbon budget for limiting global warming well below 1.5 °C and 2 °C, respectively, rendering climate mitigation much more difficult.

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Projected soil carbon loss with warming in constrained Earth system models

Abstract

Bibliographical note

Data Availability Statement

UN SDGs

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Datasets

Data From: Projected soil carbon loss with warming in constrained Earth system models

Data from Projected soil carbon loss with warming in constrained Earth system models

Dataset From: Data and code for "Projected soil carbon loss with warming in constrained Earth system models"

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