Native Plant Conservation Campaign News: NSF funded study finds that world's forests are absorbing more carbon than in the past.
March 1, 2019
The world's forests are increasingly taking up more carbon, partially offsetting the carbon being released by the burning of fossil fuels and by deforestation in the tropics, according to a new study.
"Every decade, Earth's forests are taking up carbon faster than the previous decade," said Britton Stephens, a co-author of the study and a scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR), which is funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF).
"The same is true of the oceans," said Stephens. "Even together, the ocean and the land are not keeping up with industrial carbon emissions, and the global concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is rising at an accelerating rate."
The increased plant growth in global forests could be due to several factors, including higher concentrations of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, warmer temperatures and increased availability of nitrogen.
The new study also contributes to a mounting body of evidence that tropical forests might take up more carbon -- and northern temperate forests might take up less carbon -- than many scientists once thought.
"The forests we aren't cutting down in the tropics are taking up a lot of carbon," Stephens said.
photo courtesy of Iris R. Feldman
