Items

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  Priority science can accelerate agroforestry as a natural climate solution

  The expansion of agroforestry could provide substantial climate change mitigation (up to 0.31 Pg C yr−1), comparable to other prominent natural climate solutions such as reforestation. Yet, climate-focused agroforestry efforts grapple with ambiguity about which agroforestry actions provide mitigation, uncertainty about the magnitude of that mitigation and inability to reliably track progress. In this Perspective, we define agroforestry as a natural climate solution, discuss current understanding of the controls on farm-scale mitigation potential and highlight recent innovation on emergent, high-resolution remote sensing methods to enable detection, measurement and monitoring. We also assess the status of agroforestry in the context of global climate ambitions, highlighting regions of underappreciated expansion opportunity and identifying priorities for policy and praxis.
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  A global database of land management, land-use change and climate change effects on soil organic carbon

  Increasing soil organic carbon (SOC) in natural and cultivated ecosystems is proposed as a natural climate solution to limit global warming. SOC dynamics is driven by numerous factors such as  land-use change, land management and climate change. The amount of additional carbon potentially stored in the soil is the subject of much debate in the scientific community. We present a global database compiling the results of 217 meta-analyses analyzing the effects of land management, land-use change and climate change on SOC. We report a total of 15,857 effect sizes, 6,550 directly related to soil carbon, and 9,307 related to other associated soil or plant variables. The database further synthesizes results of 13,632 unique primary studies across more than 150 countries that were used in the meta-analyses. Meta-analyses and their effect sizes and were classified by type of intervention and land use, outcomes, country and region. This database helps to understand the drivers of SOC sequestration, the associated co-benefits and potential drawbacks, and is a useful tool to guide future global climate change policies.