Country-level estimates of gross and net carbon fluxes from land use, land-use change and forestry

The reduction of CO2 emissions and the enhancement of CO2 removals related to land use are considered essential for future pathways towards net-zero emissions and mitigating climate change. With the growing pressure under global climate treaties, country-level land-use CO2 flux data are becoming increasingly important. So far, country-level estimates are mainly available through official country reports, such as the greenhouse gas inventories reported to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). Recently, different modelling approaches, namely dynamic global vegetation models (DGVMs) and bookkeeping models, have moved to higher spatial resolutions, which makes it possible to obtain model-based country-level estimates that are globally consistent in their methodology. To progress towards a largely independent assessment of country reports using models, we analyse the robustness of country-level CO2 flux estimates from different modelling approaches in the period 1950-2021 and compare them with estimates from country reports. Our results highlight the general ability of modelling approaches to estimate land-use CO2 fluxes at the country level and at higher spatial resolution. Modelled land-use CO2 flux estimates generally agree well, but the investigation of multiple DGVMs and bookkeeping models reveals that the robustness of their estimates strongly varies across countries, and substantial uncertainties remain, even for top emitters. Similarly, modelled land-use CO2 flux estimates and country-report-based estimates agree reasonably well in many countries once their differing definitions are accounted for, although differences remain in some other countries. A separate analysis of CO2 emissions and removals from land use using bookkeeping models also shows that historical peaks in net fluxes stem from emission peaks in most countries, whereas the long-term trends are more connected to removal dynamics. The ratio of the net flux to the sum of CO2 emissions and removals from land use (the net-to-gross flux ratio) underlines the spatio-temporal heterogeneity in the drivers of net land-use CO2 flux trends. In many tropical regions, net-to-gross flux ratios of about 50% are due to much larger emissions than removals; in many temperate countries, ratios close to zero show that emissions and removals largely offset each other. Considering only the net flux thus potentially masks large emissions and removals and the different timescales upon which they act, particularly if averaged over countries or larger regions, highlighting the need for future studies to focus more on the gross fluxes. Data from this study are openly available via the Zenodo portal at https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.8144174 (Obermeier et al., 2023).