Articles | Volume 15, issue 5
https://doi.org/10.5194/essd-15-2025-2023
https://doi.org/10.5194/essd-15-2025-2023
Data description paper
 | 
23 May 2023
Data description paper |  | 23 May 2023

Annual emissions of carbon from land use, land-use change, and forestry from 1850 to 2020

Richard A. Houghton and Andrea Castanho

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Cited articles

Baccini, A., Walker, W., Carvalho, L., Farina, M., Sulla-Menashe, D., and Houghton, R. A.: Tropical forests are a net carbon source based on aboveground measurements of gain and loss, Science, 358, 230–234, https://doi.org/10.1126/science.aam5962, 2017. 
Bartalev, S. A., Plotnikov, D. E., and Loupian, E. A.: Mapping of arable land in Russia using multi-year time series of MODIS data and the LAGMA classification technique, Remote Sens. Lett., 7, 269–278, 2016. 
Bastos, A., Hartung, K., Nützel, T. B., Nabel, J. E. M. S., Houghton, R. A., and Pongratz, J.: Comparison of uncertainties in land-use change fluxes from bookkeeping model parameterisation, Earth Syst. Dynam., 12, 745–762, https://doi.org/10.5194/esd-12-745-2021, 2021. 
Beckett, H., Staver, A. C., Charles-Dominique, T., and Bond, W. J.: Pathways of savannization in a mesic African savanna–forest mosaic following an extreme fire, J. Ecol., 110, 902–915, 2022. 
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We update a previous analysis of carbon emissions (annual and national) from land use, land-use change, and forestry from 1850 to 2020. We use data from the latest (2020) Global Forest Resources Assessment, incorporate shifting cultivation, and include improvements to the bookkeeping model and recent estimates of emissions from peatlands. Net global emissions declined steadily over the decade from 2011 to 2020 (mean of 0.96 Pg C yr−1), falling below 1.0 Pg C yr−1 for the first time in 30 years.
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