Annual carbon emissions from land-use change in China from 1000 to 2019

Abstract. Long-term land-use changes have profound impact on terrestrial ecosystem and the associated carbon balance. Current estimates of China’s historical carbon emissions induced by land-use change varies widely, where in the magnitude of China for 1950–2021 exhibit great uncertainties reaching as large as 150 % in global estimates, while the national-scale estimates for a longer time period of past 300 years show a relative uncertainty of 102 %. Here, we utilized bookkeeping method to quantify China’s annual carbon budget resulting from land-use change between 1000 and 2019, driven by a millennial dataset of land-use change in China in provincial level, assisted with comprehensive soil and vegetation carbon density datasets. This approach, supported by high-confidence land-use change data, extensive soil and vegetation carbon field sampling, and an updated disturbance-response curve, enhanced the accuracy of carbon budget estimations. The results revealed that cumulative carbon emissions from land-use change in China reached 19.61 Pg C over the past millennium. Moreover, critical turning points occurred in the early 18^th century and early 1980s, with emissions accelerating in the 18^th century and transitioning from carbon source to carbon sink in the early 1980s. Our findings revealed values 68 %–328 % higher than previous 300-year estimates, suggesting that historical carbon emissions from land-use change in China may have been significantly underestimated. This study provides a robust historical baseline for assessing terrestrial ecosystem carbon budgets at national and provincial scales, both in the present and future. The dataset is available at https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.14557386 (Yang et al., 2025).