Plants absorb carbon dioxide from the air and store it in their leaves, stems, roots and the soil. But as climate change and human activities drive more plant species toward extinction, that stored carbon could be released back into the atmosphere, potentially accelerating climate change. A new study published in Nature Communications suggests this biodiversity-driven carbon loss may be a major overlooked source of future emissions. The researchers used computer modeling to estimate that losing plant diversity around the world could release between 7 billion and 146 billion metric tons of carbon from vegetation. At the upper end, that’s equivalent to more than 12 years’ worth of carbon dioxide emissions from all the cars in the world. “The magnitude was surprising to me,” study lead author Sarah Weiskopf, a research ecologist at the U.S. Geological Survey, told Mongabay. “Those higher-level estimates for how much carbon emissions we could see with plant diversity loss are pretty high.” The study looked at how the number of different plant species found in a specific areas or ecosystems worldwide could decline under future climate change and land use scenarios. The scientists then calculated how much carbon storage would be lost as plant species disappear. They found that biodiversity hotspots in the Amazon Rainforest, Central Africa and Southeast Asia could be hit hardest by both species loss and biodiversity-driven carbon storage declines, as these regions have high species richness and large vegetation carbon stocks. Southern Australia also showed significant potential biodiversity loss, but with lower total biomass.…This article was originally published on Mongabay
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