Land Use, Carbon Sinks and Negative Emissions for Climate targets

The project will lead to new knowledge on the possibility for the world to strive for the new global climate targets that call
for limiting global warming to well below 2°C. Research indicates that this requires that the cumulative global greenhouse
gas emissions stay below 1000 GtC. This corresponds to transformative change in the society, reduced emissions, increased carbon removals from the atmosphere by sinks and introduction of negative emissions by means of Carbon Capture and Storage combined with biomass for energy. However, there are still question on how carbon sinks will evolve under climate change. Neither do we know sufficiently well how much biomass can be produced on a sustainable basis, also considering other land uses than for energy. Climate change may actually weaken natural carbon sinks and thus compound the climate mitigation challenge. The project addresses these questions.

The project makes use of the latest generation of advanced climate and vegetation/ecosystem models. The starting point for the experiments is the “standard” emission pathway space for low-carbon futures. Its applicability will be studied by explicit consideration of climate impacts on sinks and how this may change the “allowable” cumulative emissions. We also look into the potential for enhancing carbon sinks both globally and in regions, also considering the uncertainty related to
relevant processes, and the potential of biomass production and negative emissions are considered.