Protected areas' role in climate-change mitigation

• Main Authors: Melillo, Jerry M. (Author), Lu, Xiaoliang (Author), Kicklighter, David W. (Author), Reilly, John M. (Contributor), Cai, Yongxia (Author), Sokolov, Andrei P. (Contributor)
• Other Authors: Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Center for Global Change Science (Contributor), Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Joint Program on the Science & Policy of Global Change (Contributor)
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Springer Netherlands, 2016-06-23T16:42:04Z.
• Subjects: Article
• Online Access: Get fulltext

Globally, 15.5 million km2 of land are currently identified as protected areas, which provide society with many ecosystem services including climate-change mitigation. Combining a global database of protected areas, a reconstruction of global land-use history, and a global biogeochemistry model, we estimate that protected areas currently sequester 0.5 Pg C annually, which is about one fifth of the carbon sequestered by all land ecosystems annually. Using an integrated earth systems model to generate climate and land-use scenarios for the twenty-first century, we project that rapid climate change, similar to high-end projections in IPCC's Fifth Assessment Report, would cause the annual carbon sequestration rate in protected areas to drop to about 0.3 Pg C by 2100. For the scenario with both rapid climate change and extensive land-use change driven by population and economic pressures, 5.6 million km2 of protected areas would be converted to other uses, and carbon sequestration in the remaining protected areas would drop to near zero by 2100.
David and Lucile Packard Foundation
National Science Foundation (U.S.) (grant 1027955)
United States. Environmental Protection Agency (US EPA grant XA-83600001-1)
United States. Dept. of Energy (US DOE grant DEFG02-94ER61937)