Primary estimation of Chinese terrestrial carbon sequestration during 2001–2010

Quantifying the carbon budgets of terrestrial ecosystems is the foundation on which to understand the role of these ecosystems as carbon sinks and to mitigate global climate change. Through a re-examination of the conceptual framework of ecosystem productivity and the integration of multi-source data, we assumed that the entire terrestrial ecosystems in China to be a large-scale regional biome-society system. We approximated the carbon fluxes of key natural and anthropogenic processes at a regional scale, including fluxes of emissions from reactive carbon and creature ingestion, and fluxes of emissions from anthropogenic and natural disturbances. The gross primary productivity, ecosystem respiration and net ecosystem productivity (NEP) in China were 7.78, 5.89 and 1.89 PgC a−1, respectively, during the period from 2001 to 2010. After accounting for the consumption of reactive carbon and creature ingestion (0.078 PgC a−1), fires (0.002 PgC a−1), water erosion (0.038 PgC a−1) and agricultural and forestry utilization (0.806 PgC a−1), the final carbon sink in China was about 0.966 PgC a−1; this was considered as the climate-based potential terrestrial ecosystem carbon sink for the current climate conditions in China. The carbon emissions caused by anthropogenic disturbances accounted for more than 42% of the NEP, which indicated that humans can play an important role in increasing terrestrial carbon sequestration and mitigating global climate change. This role can be fulfilled by reducing the carbon emissions caused by human activities and by prolonging the residence time of fixed organic carbon in the large-scale regional biome-society system through the improvement of ecosystem management.