Enhanced agricultural carbon sinks provide benefits for farmers and the climate.

Carbon sequestration on agricultural land, albeit long-time neglected, offers substantial mitigation potential. Here we project, using an economic land-use model, that these options offer cumulative mitigation potentials comparable to afforestation by 2050 at 160 USD tCO equivalent (tCOe), with most of it located in the Global South. Carbon sequestration on agricultural land could provide producers around the world with additional revenues of up to 375 billion USD at 160 USD tCOe and allow achievement of net-zero emissions in the agriculture, forestry and other land-use sectors by 2050 already at economic costs of around 80-120 USD tCOe.

Modelling the effects of climate and management on the distribution of deadwood in European forests.

Deadwood is a key old-growth element in European forests and a cornerstone of biodiversity conservation practices in the region, recognized as an important indicator of sustainable forest management. Despite its importance as a legacy element for biodiversity, uncertainties remain on the drivers of deadwood potentials, its spatial distribution in European forests and how it may change in the future due to management and climate change. To fill this gap, we combined a comprehensive deadwood dataset to fit a machine learning and a Bayesian hurdle-lognormal model against multiple environmental and socio-economic predictors.

Can Forest Management Practices Counteract Species Loss Arising from Increasing European Demand for Forest Biomass under Climate Mitigation Scenarios?

Forests are home to many species and provide biomass for material and energy. Here, we modeled the potential global species extinction risk from future scenarios of climate mitigation and EU28 forest management. We considered the continuation of current practices, the adoption of closer-to-nature management (low-intensity practices), and set-asides (conversion to unharvested forestland) on portions of EU28 forestland under two climate mitigation pathways as well as the consequences for the wood trade.

Spatially explicit LCA analysis of biodiversity losses due to different bioenergy policies in the European Union.

In this study, the potential global loss of species directly associated with land use in the EU and due to trade with other regions is computed over time, in order to reveal differences in impacts between the considered alternatives of plausible bioenergy policies development in the EU. The spatially explicit study combines a life cycle analysis (LCA) for biodiversity impact assessment with a global high resolution economic land use model. Both impacts of domestic land use and impacts through imports were included for estimating the biodiversity footprint of the member states of the (EU28).