Sasmito, Sigit D., Taillardat, Peter, Adinugroho, Wahyu C., Krisnawati, Haruni, Novita, Nisa, Fatoyinbo, Lola, Friess, Daniel A., Page, Susan E., Lovelock, Catherine E., Murdiyarso, Daniel, Taylor, David, and Lupascu, Massimo (2025) Half of land use carbon emissions in Southeast Asia can be mitigated through peat swamp forest and mangrove conservation and restoration. Nature Communications, 16. 740.

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Abstract

Southeast Asia (SEA) contributes approximately one-third of global land-use change carbon emissions, a substantial yet highly uncertain part of which is from anthropogenically-modified peat swamp forests (PSFs) and mangroves. Here, we report that between 2001–2022 land-use change impacting PSFs and mangroves in SEA generate approximately 691.8±97.2 teragrams of CO2 equivalent emissions annually (TgCO2eyr−1) or 48% of region’s land-use change emissions, and carbon removal through secondary regrowth of −16.3 ± 2.0 TgCO2eyr−1. Indonesia (73%), Malaysia (14%), Myanmar (7%), and Vietnam (2%) combined accounted for over 90% of regional emissions from these sources. Consequently, great potential exists for emissions reduction through PSFs and mangroves conservation. Moreover, restoring degraded PSFs and mangroves could provide an additional annual mitigation potential of 94.4 ± 7.4 TgCO2eyr−1. Although peatlands and mangroves occupy only 5.4% of SEA land area, restoring and protecting these carbon-dense ecosystems can contribute substantially to climate change mitigation, while maintaining valuable ecosystem services, livelihoods and biodiversity.

Item ID:	84538
Item Type:	Article (Research - C1)
ISSN:	2041-1723
Copyright Information:	This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License, which permits any non-commercial use, sharing, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if you modified the licensed material. You do not have permission under this licence to share adapted material derived from this article or parts of it. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/
Date Deposited:	29 Jan 2025 02:32
FoR Codes:	31 BIOLOGICAL SCIENCES > 3199 Other biological sciences > 319902 Global change biology @ 100%
SEO Codes:	19 ENVIRONMENTAL POLICY, CLIMATE CHANGE AND NATURAL HAZARDS > 1903 Mitigation of climate change > 190301 Climate change mitigation strategies @ 100%
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