Work

Annual carbon emissions from land-use change in China from 1000 to 2019

Year: 2026

Type: article

Abstract: . Long-term land-use changes have profound impact on terrestrial ecosystem and the associated carbon balance. Current estimates of China’s historical carbon emissions induced by land-use change varies widely, where in the magnitude of China for 1950–2021 exhibit great uncertainties reaching as large as 150 % in global estimates, while the national-scale estimates for a longer time period of past 300 years show a relative uncertainty of 102 %. Here, we utilized bookkeeping method to quantify China’s annual carbon budget resulting from land-use change between 1000 and 2019, driven by a millennial dataset of land-use change in China in provincial level, assisted with comprehensive soil and vegetation carbon density datasets. This approach, supported by high-confidence land-use change data, extensive soil and vegetation carbon field sampling, and an updated disturbance-response curve, enhanced the accuracy of carbon budget estimations. The results revealed that cumulative carbon emissions from land-use change in China reached 19.61 Pg C over the past millennium. Moreover, critical turning points occurred in the early 18th century and early 1980s, with emissions accelerating in the 18th century and transitioning from carbon source to carbon sink in the early 1980s. Our findings revealed values 68 %–328 % higher than previous 300-year estimates, suggesting that historical carbon emissions from land-use change in China may have been significantly underestimated. This study provides a robust historical baseline for assessing terrestrial ecosystem carbon budgets at national and provincial scales, both in the present and future. The dataset is available at https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.14557386 (Yang et al., 2025).

Source: Earth system science data

DOI: 10.5194/essd-18-875-2026