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

Abstract. Estimates of the annual emissions of carbon from Land Use, Land-Use Change, and Forestry (LULUCF) are important for tracking global, regional, and national carbon budgets, which in turn help predict future rates of climate change and help define potential solutions for mitigation. Here we update a long-term (1850–2020) series of annual, national carbon emissions from LULUCF (Houghton and Nassikas, 2017), based largely, after 1960, on statistics of land use from the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations (Faostat, 2021). Those data suggest that rates of deforestation in the tropics (and thus net emissions of carbon) have decreased over the last ten years (2011–2020). The data also indicate that the net loss of tropical forests is greater than the net gain in croplands and pastures, and we explore three alternative interpretations of this apparent forest conversion, one of which is shifting cultivation. We note that LULUCF is not equivalent to LULCC (Land-Use and Land-Cover Change), and suggest that the difference between “land use” and “land cover” may contribute to variation among independent estimates of emissions. The calculated emissions of carbon based on LULUCF approximate the anthropogenic component of terrestrial carbon emissions, but carbon management opportunities exist for unmanaged lands as well.