Seeing the forest not for the carbon

why concentrating on land-use-induced carbon stock changes of soils in Brazil can be climate-unfriendly

authored by

Jens Boy, Simone Strey, Regine Schönenberg, Robert Strey, Oscarlina Weber-Santos, Claas Nendel, Michael Klingler, Charlotte Schumann, Korbinian Hartberger, Georg Guggenberger

Abstract

Soil carbon stocks of 29 plots along a transect through tropical Brazil showed only minor soil carbon losses after land use shift, although replacement of forest-derived carbon was detectable in subsoil and topsoil, indicating that new equilibria in soil carbon stocks might not have been reached after deforestation. The proportion of carbon lost from soils was negligible as compared to the emissions from biomass reduction by deforestation itself. Industrial agriculture had the best ratio between food production and carbon loss, pointing toward a potential reduction of deforestation pressure by further agricultural intensification, which is not achieved in practice due to institutional obstacles and uneven benefit sharing. In contrast, farmers at the agricultural frontier were identified as change agents if alternative sustainable land uses, taking advantage of biodiversity-related ecosystem services, are fostered by better access to credit lines and extension management. Thus, constraining the climate change debate in agriculture to sole management of carbon stock changes in soil is misleading and draws the attention from the most urgent problems: deforestation caused by wrong incentives.

Organisation(s)

Institute of Soil Science

External Organisation(s)

Freie Universität Berlin (FU Berlin)
Universidade Federal de Mato Grosso
Leibniz Centre for Agricultural Landscape Research (ZALF)
University of Innsbruck

Type

Article

Journal

Regional environmental change

Volume

18

Pages

63-75

No. of pages

13

ISSN

1436-3798

Publication date

01.2018

Publication status

Published

Peer reviewed

Yes

ASJC Scopus subject areas

Global and Planetary Change

Sustainable Development Goals

SDG 2 - Zero Hunger, SDG 13 - Climate Action, SDG 15 - Life on Land

Electronic version(s)

https://doi.org/10.1007/s10113-016-1008-1 (Access: Closed)