This study reveals that forest expansion in China from 1980 to 2019 significantly contributed to the national terrestrial carbon sink (8.9 ± 0.8 Pg carbon), a finding largely underestimated in previous studies due to biases in the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) land-use data. The authors developed a new land-use and cover-change database for China, correcting these biases. Their land ecosystem model simulations demonstrate that land-use and cover changes (LUCC) accounted for nearly 44% of the total carbon sink, surpassing the contributions from climate change, nitrogen deposition, and rising CO2 levels. This highlights the importance of reliable LUCC databases in global carbon budget accounting.

Zhen Yu, Philippe Ciais, Shilong Piao, Richard A. Houghton, Chaoqun Lu, Hanqin Tian, Evgenios Agathokleous, Giri Raj Kattel, Stephen Sitch, Daniel Goll, Xu Yue, Anthony Walker, Pierre Friedlingstein, Atul K. Jain, Shirong Liu, Guoyi Zhou