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Protected areas’ role in climate-change mitigation

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Abstract

Globally, 15.5 million km2 of land are currently identified as protected areas, which provide society with many ecosystem services including climate-change mitigation. Combining a global database of protected areas, a reconstruction of global land-use history, and a global biogeochemistry model, we estimate that protected areas currently sequester 0.5 Pg C annually, which is about one fifth of the carbon sequestered by all land ecosystems annually. Using an integrated earth systems model to generate climate and land-use scenarios for the twenty-first century, we project that rapid climate change, similar to high-end projections in IPCC’s Fifth Assessment Report, would cause the annual carbon sequestration rate in protected areas to drop to about 0.3 Pg C by 2100. For the scenario with both rapid climate change and extensive land-use change driven by population and economic pressures, 5.6 million km2 of protected areas would be converted to other uses, and carbon sequestration in the remaining protected areas would drop to near zero by 2100.

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Acknowledgments

This research was supported by the David and Lucile Packard Foundation, National Science Foundation grant 1027955, US EPA grant XA-83600001-1, and US DOE grant DE-FG02-94ER61937.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. The Ecosystems Center, Marine Biological Laboratory, 7 MBL St., Woods Hole, MA, 02543, USA

    Jerry M. Melillo, Xiaoliang Lu & David W. Kicklighter

  2. Joint Program on the Science and Policy of Global Change, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 77 Massachusetts Avenue, MIT E19-411, Cambridge, MA, 02139-4307, USA

    John M. Reilly & Andrei P. Sokolov

  3. Agricultural, Resource and Energy Economics and Policy Program, Social, Statistical, and Environmental Sciences, RTI International, 3040 Cornwallis Road, P. O. Box 12194, Research Triangle Park, NC, 27709-2194, USA

    Yongxia Cai

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  1. Jerry M. Melillo
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  2. Xiaoliang Lu
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Correspondence to Jerry M. Melillo.

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Melillo, J.M., Lu, X., Kicklighter, D.W. et al. Protected areas’ role in climate-change mitigation. Ambio 45, 133–145 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13280-015-0693-1

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