A new study reveals that the carbon stored by plants globally is more transient and vulnerable to climate change impacts than previously understood. Led by Dr. Heather Graven from Imperial College London, the research shows that current climate models significantly underestimate how much CO2 is absorbed by vegetation annually and overestimate the duration it is retained, suggesting that carbon is released back into the atmosphere sooner than expected.
Dr Graven, a Reader in Climate Physics in Imperial’s Department of Physics, said: “Plants across the world are actually more productive than we thought they were.” The results show that current, widely used models that simulate how land and vegetation interact with the atmosphere underestimate the Net Primary Productivity of plants globally. The results also show that the models overestimate the storage time of carbon in plants.Co-author Dr Charles Koven, from Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, USA, said: “These observations are from a unique moment in history, just after the peak of atomic weapons testing in the atmosphere in the 1960s.