Sustainable growth of China’s forest biomass carbon storage since 2002: Facing threats and loss risks

Abstract

Forest biomass carbon storage (BC) plays a critical role in mitigating climate change. However, the spatiotemporal patterns and stability of BC growth in China remain unclear. Using the latest BC maps (2002–2021) and multi-source remote sensing data, we analyzed the spatiotemporal dynamics of BC and applied resilience indicators to reliably assess its stability. Our results show that while China’s long-term BC has continued to increase, the risk of BC losses has also intensified, particularly in old forests (>70 years), where approximately half exhibit a declining trend. Moreover, BC dynamics do not consistently align with resilience changes. About 53.4 % of forests display weakening resilience, directly reducing BC accumulation rates by 23.1 % and amplifying interannual variability. Alarmingly, 10.4 % of forests (BC-, resilience-), predominantly high-BC-density forests (mean: 28.3 tC/ha), face an extremely high risk of carbon loss (carbon emissions: -118 Tg C). We further found that the accelerating effect of resilience weakening on BC losses significantly outweighs the promoting effect of resilience enhancement on BC accumulation (-17.79 ± 4.72 Mg/ha vs. 11.47 ± 3.42 Mg/ha). Our study highlights that China’s BC growth is characterized by unstable components and faces substantial loss risks. In future efforts to enhance forest carbon sinks, greater attention should be paid to changes in forest resilience to improve the stability of biomass carbon sinks and achieve sustainable, long-term carbon sequestration.

Keywords

Mitigating climate change / SDGs / Biomass carbon / Resilience / Substantial carbon sink

Data availability

Data will be made available on request.

CRediT authorship contribution statement

Qiancheng Lv: Writing – review & editing, Writing – original draft, Project administration, Methodology, Formal analysis. Zeyu Yang: Writing – original draft, Visualization, Validation. Yuheng Fu: Writing – review & editing. Shaohua Wang: Validation. Manchun Li: Writing – review & editing. Bingbo Gao: Validation. Jing Yang: Visualization. Chaoqun Zhang: Visualization. Jianqiang Hu: Visualization. Ziyue Chen: Writing – original draft, Funding acquisition.

Declaration of competing interests

The authors declare no competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have influenced the work reported in this article.

Acknowledgements

This research was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant No. 41901414) and the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities (Grant No. 2243200008).

Supplementary materials

Supplementary material associated with this article can be found, in the online version, at doi:10.1016/j.geosus.2025.100340.

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