View article

Vegetation biomass carbon stocks play a vital role in the climate system, but the analysis of long-term carbon budgets is hindered by the lack of benchmarked estimates from the 20th century. Here, by integrating inventory-based information on land use and carbon densities in a closed-budget land accounting approach, we establish a mid-20th century global carbon stocks account. Our approach integrates global forest assessments from the mid-20th century, previously ignored in global land change studies, and inventory-based land use reconstructions across the 20th century with contemporaneous information on potential carbon stocks, the likely presence/absence of woody cover and the extent of shifting cultivation in the tropics. In a scenario-based analysis, we find that vegetation stored 540 PgC in biomass (median of 1728 cases per world region; inner quantiles 455-618 PgC). We focus on two Focal Cases …