The choices made about how land is used and managed play a crucial role in tackling climate change.
The importance of the land use, land-use change and forestry sector (which is often referred to as LULUCF) is reflected in 118 of 143 countries including land-based emissions reductions and removals in their latest emissions pledges under the Paris Agreement.
However, there is a complication.
It arises because of a fundamental difference in how land-based emissions are treated by scientific models and the national greenhouse gas inventories submitted by parties to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC).
Specifically, there are different definitions as to what constitutes “managed” land and the human-caused carbon removals on that land.
As we show in our new study, published in Nature, the result is a gap of 4-7bn tonnes of CO2 (GtCO2) between estimates from models and national inventories for net emissions from current land use. Even at the low end of this range, it equates to around 10% of global annual CO2 emissions today.
The knock-on impact of this gap is that it makes comparisons between the two difficult in critical policy processes such as the global stocktake – the five-yearly progress check on collective action towards the long-term goal of the Paris Agreement.
And, more fundamentally, our findings suggest that nations will need to increase the collective ambition of their climate targets to remain consistent with the Paris temperature limits.
Making sense of LULUCF accounting
In order to estimate the amount of carbon emissions or removals of carbon from land, scientists use so-called “bookkeeping” approaches.
These approaches, and the models that employ them, account for stocks and flows of carbon triggered by changes in land cover or land management practices and estimate the resulting “direct” carbon fluxes.
The term “direct” is used because the fluxes – that is, the exchange of CO2 between the land and atmosphere – are a result of direct human intervention. These actions, including deforestation, forest harvest and regrowth, are what scientific models consider as “anthropogenic” carbon fluxes.
This accounting approach is used by the models underpinning the concepts of the remaining carbon budget and net-zero timings in the assessment reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).
But to understand the total amount of carbon flux on land, scientists need to use more detailed, process-based vegetation models. These models, collectively called “dynamic global vegetation models”, simulate biogeochemical and hydrological cycles and estimate future plant and forest carbon uptake and release.
These models explicitly include climate and environmental interactions and so they capture so-called “indirect” effects. These include the response of land to indirect human-induced climate and environmental changes, such as through CO2 fertilisation and warming-induced changes to temperatures and rainfall patterns, which affect plant growth.
These “indirect” fluxes are estimated for Earth’s full land surface area, including both land actively managed by humans as well as land with limited or no human activity in what global models consider as the “natural” terrestrial sink.
Taken together, both direct and indirect carbon fluxes on land provide a full picture of the land-related carbon balance, which is assessed each year by the Global Carbon Project.
However, countries estimate their LULUCF fluxes differently. This is because it is not practically possible to separate direct and indirect fluxes through observations, such as via national forest inventories or satellite data.
National GHG inventories follow reporting conventions that define human-caused fluxes using an area-based approach, whereby all fluxes occurring on managed land are considered anthropogenic. By contrast, fluxes on unmanaged land are not reported.
In addition to land that is actively managed for, say, agriculture and forestry practices, countries may consider other land as “managed”, such as national parks, wilderness preserves or areas under less frequent forest management.
But even if countries and models agreed on the amount of land which is considered “managed”, physical measurements and observations cannot distinguish between direct and indirect contributions to LULUCF fluxes.
As a result, national inventories include most of the indirect effect on a larger land area than is considered under scientific conventions. In short, countries consider “anthropogenic” part of the CO2 sink that models consider “natural”.
The infographic below outlines this mismatch. It shows how scientific models differentiate between direct (red) and indirect (blue) fluxes, while national inventories (green) do not.
Globally, this mismatch results in a difference between bookkeeping models and country inventories of around 4-7GtCO2. As the map below shows, the differences vary from country to country.
Overall, 53 and 56 countries report, respectively, LULUCF net removals (pale green shading) and emissions (purple) where models agree. Then 67 countries report net removals, but models suggest net emissions (dark green) and nine countries report net emissions while models show net removals (blue).
Shifting benchmarks
In our study, we propose a method for resolving these differences. We employ a reduced-complexity climate model called OSCAR, which has an explicit representation of the land carbon cycle. We use it to estimate the current and future evolution of indirect emissions to align IPCC pathways with aggregate estimates from national inventories.
We then estimate how this would affect mitigation benchmarks, such as the emissions reductions needed by 2030, the year of net-zero CO2 emissions and the total cumulative CO2 emitted until net-zero.
Across the board, we find that key global mitigation benchmarks become harder to achieve when calculated using conventions set in national inventories, requiring more ambitious mitigation action than when aiming for model-based outcomes.
For example, under inventory accounting conventions, we find that net-zero in emissions pathways that are consistent with 1.5C of warming is achieved one-to-five years earlier than in model-based conventions. Similarly, emissions reduction benchmarks this decade are three-to-six percentage points higher and cumulative CO2 emissions are 15-18% lower.
These shifts arise because of the additional land-based carbon removals in national inventories, or “alignment factor”, acts to lower current global emissions compared to model-based conventions. The alignment factor will diminish over time should the world succeed in reducing emissions drastically in the near-term.
| Benchmark | Change in 1.5C pathways | Change in 2C pathways |
|---|---|---|
| Year of net-zero CO2 | 1 to 5 years | -1 to 7 years |
| Emissions reductions by 2030 | 3.4 to 5.9% | 2.5 to 5% |
| Cumulative CO2 until net-zero | 54-95 GtCO2 (15-18%) | 93-167 GtCO2 (15-18%) |
Table shows difference in key mitigation benchmarks between pathways including fluxes aligned with model-based conventions vs. pathways including fluxes aligned with inventory-based conventions (5th-95th percentiles). Across the board, benchmarks are more difficult to reach when aligned with national inventories.
IPCC assessment
It is important to stress that our results do not conflict with the benchmarks assessed by the IPCC.
The use of simple climate models, such as MAGICC and FaIR, in IPCC assessments includes the “direct” LULUCF emissions from pathways as inputs and include in their simulations the “indirect” emissions due to climate and environmental responses to calculate the global temperature response to human-caused emissions.
In our analysis, we explicitly separate these two flux components, adding the indirect fluxes on “managed” land to our estimate of the direct fluxes. In short, we simply align different accounting practices, shifting fluxes on one side of the “ledger” to the other.
The climate outcome of each scenario we assess remains the same, but the benchmark – when viewed through the lens of inventory accounting conventions – shifts. Understanding this dynamic is critical, because ultimately countries will measure their progress towards achieving the long-term temperature goal of the Paris Agreement against their own accounting conventions.
Our findings show the danger of comparing apples to oranges: in order to achieve the global mitigation benchmarks assessed by the IPCC, global mitigation action needs to be stronger and more ambitious when using the national inventories perspective.
While our adjustment does not change the overall amount of decarbonisation effort necessary to reach the Paris Agreement goal, it changes where we currently stand relative to it.
In the absence of such adjustment, countries would collectively appear in a better position than they actually are.
Depending heavily on LULUCF
Our results also provide a warning to countries depending strongly on the land sector to achieve their national climate pledges under the Paris Agreement.
From a bookkeeping accounting perspective, sustainable land-management practices can both strongly reduce existing sources of emissions as well as enhance land-based carbon removal.
Across pathways assessed by the IPCC, “direct” emissions typically reduce strongly and stay net-negative through the rest of the century. However, in the pathways we reanalyse, inventory-aligned emissions on land begin to reverse around mid-century and become a net source of emissions in about a quarter of the assessed pathways by the end of the century. This is because the weakening of the indirect effect contributes more than the strengthening of the direct effect in these scenarios.
While inventory-aligned fluxes result in smaller net emissions today compared to model-based fluxes, depending on them to achieve national climate targets presents a “double-edged sword”.
The indirect component of these fluxes is due to climate and environmental effects, which will change based on how strongly and quickly the world is able to reduce emissions in the future.
In particular, with high levels of mitigation, as the rate that CO2 accumulates in the atmosphere slows down, the strength of indirect fluxes will decrease and may even reverse.
Thus, countries should take care when depending strongly on the land sector as enhanced “direct” emissions reductions and removals can be masked by weakening “indirect” fluxes.
Other important factors which we did not consider could make depending on land-based removals even riskier, such as disturbances from wildfires, which will likely increase as the world continues to warm.
The graphic below provides an illustration. It shows the impact on direct (red) and indirect (blue) carbon emissions (up arrows) and removals (down) for scenarios with low (top) and high (bottom) global mitigation, and unchanged (left) and increased (right) land-based mitigation. The overall impact of each combination on net emissions is shown by the green arrows.
Moving forward
Our study highlights the importance of comparing apples to apples when trying to evaluate and take stock of progress towards the Paris Agreement.
Part of the core enabling architecture of the agreement was its “bottom-up” nature, enabling countries to set targets and measure progress towards them in such a way that fits national circumstances. At the same time, care must be taken to comparing these efforts with pathways assessed by the global scientific community.
Here, we offer one way to use the “Rosetta Stone” approach to align IPCC-assessed pathways with national emissions inventories, which can be used to assess progress in the near-term. We offer a number of recommendations for improving this moving forward.
First, we suggest that national climate targets can be made more explicit by separating targets for land-based mitigation from other sector-based action. In this way, each can be measured and assessed separately and uncertainties due to accounting differences can be contained.
Second, we suggest that countries can be more explicit and clarify their deforestation pledges, as direct and indirect carbon fluxes vary greatly in different forest types.
Third, we suggest that scientific and policymaking communities convene to agree on an “operational translation system”. That is, something that would allow each to understand the other by addressing any remaining inconsistencies and develop methods for estimating country-considered indirect fluxes to support comparison with modelled pathways.
And, fourth, we suggest that modellers incorporate their own estimates of the indirect effect from the land-component of their integrated models. Together with efforts by policymaking communities, this would bring alignment directly into IPCC reports to improve comparability with global progress towards the Paris Agreement.
Countries will come together at COP28 this year to conclude the very first global stocktake of the Paris Agreement.
Our assessment shows that even more ambitious climate action is needed to achieve the benchmarks laid out by scientists when using national inventory accounting as a starting point, which will help future stocktakes.
It is critical that progress is measured in a like-for-like manner rather than the current situation comparing apples and oranges.
Even so, the overarching message remains loud and clear that the world must drastically cut emissions this decade, irrespective of accounting frameworks, to stay within the limits of the Paris Agreement. It is vital this message is not lost in the minutia of discussions around reporting technicalities.
The post Guest post: Why resolving how land emissions are counted is critical for tracking climate progress appeared first on Carbon Brief.
Guest post: Why resolving how land emissions are counted is critical for tracking climate progress
The United Nations Secretary-General and foreign ministers from the UK, France and Spain have blamed the deadly wildfires engulfing Europe on climate change, using the disaster to renew calls for faster cuts to greenhouse gas emissions.
António Guterres told journalists on Friday that the “climate crisis is in overdrive”, adding that global heat seen so far is just a “warm up act” as a phenomenon known as El Niño intensifies “adding fuel to a planet already on fire”.
A new World Meteorological Organisation (WMO) report published on Friday predicts that the weather pattern will grow into a “strong event” between now and October, increasing the risk of higher than normal temperatures across much of the world and disrupted rainfalls.
“That risks shattering every seasonal record – and driving even more severe effects worldwide,” Guterres said.
El Niño builds on top of an already warming world, driven primarily by the burning of fossil fuels. A WMO scientist, who did not want to be named, told journalists that all the heatwaves and other climate impacts seen so far this year are “before the effects of El Niño are really kicking in at a global scale”.
Fossil fuellling the fires
Fires have broken out across much of Europe but are threatening the most people in the south-west of France near Bordeaux and in Central Spain near Madrid. Nearly a quarter of a million people have been evacuated in France with hundreds of homes destroyed while in Spain 80,000 people have had to leave their homes and at least 13 died in one village.
A scientific study published on Friday by the World Weather Attribution group found that man-made climate change made deadly fires in France twice as likely and those in Spain twenty times more likely. Smaller fires in the UK were not analysed by the study.
UN Climate Change leader Simon Stiell blamed fossil fuels for the fires, as well as storms in Chile and heatwaves in North America and Japan in recent weeks. “The climate alarm is blaring”, he said on Wednesday.
Guterres criticised new fossil fuel production projects and fossil fuel subsidies for causing hardship across the world. Discussing his speech, a senior UN official – who did not want to be named – said the subsidies amounted to trillions of US dollars a year and criticised pension funds and institutional investors, including insurance companies, for continuing to invest in fossil fuel projects.
Asked why world leaders and the public are not prioritising climate action, Guterres said they are distracted by wars in Ukraine, the Middle East, Sudan and elsewhere and sometimes forget “other aspects that are a sometimes even more dangerous threat”.
Also the fossil fuel industry and “some countries” are campaigning to pretend that climate change does not exist, he said, adding that the UN should be more active in “naming the situations as they are and the responsibilties as they are and mobilising the public opinion”.
After meetings in Paris and Madrid earlier in the week, the UK’s new foreign minister Ed Miliband issued joint statements with his French and Spanish counterparts – Jean-Noël Barrot and José Manuel Albares Bueno – calling on the world to reduce its dependence on fossil fuels.
They promised to do more to reduce emissions and protect their people and encouraged other governments to do the same.
The UK-French statement called on governments to publish UN climate plans, known as nationally determined contributions (NDCs), which are aligned with the Paris Agreement’s goal to limit global average temperatures to 1.5C above pre-industrial levels.
According to Climate Action Tracker, only three countries – the UK, Nigeria and Norway – have submitted NDCs with 2035 emissions reduction targets which are compatible with 1.5C. Fifty-two countries – including Egypt, Vietnam and Argentina – have yet to submit an NDC at all.
Defending science
Beyond action on emissions, the ministers also intervened in an ongoing dispute over the timing of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC)’s next flagship assessment.
Miliband and Barrot’s statement said they “underline the importance” of scientific report feeding into governments’ next global stocktake of progress on climate action in two years’ time, calling it a “critical input” to that process.
The timing of this report has been a contentious issue in government negotiations at the IPCC and at June’s climate talks in Bonn. While a group of nations calling themselves the “friends of science” want the report before the stocktake, others like Saudi Arabia and India have argued that this would make the report of a worse quality and less inclusive of developing countries’ scientists.
Science ‘under attack’ from fossil fuel interests at UN climate talks
The UK-Spanish statement weighed in less explicitly on this issue but said that they “recall the importance of scientific evidence and acknowledge the work of the IPCC in this respect.”
The British and French ministers said they would seek to accelerate reductions of emissions in methane, a particularly potent greenhouse gas, at COP31 in November. They encouraged governments “to work jointly to develop a marketplace for fossil fuels with near-zero methane intensity.”
Methane leaks from oil, gas and coal production are a major contributor to global warming. Over a 20-year period, methane traps around 80 times more heat than carbon dioxide.
The UK and Spanish statement emphasised the importance of supporting the Global South and underlined the need to mobilise sustainable financing “at scale with the challenge we face”. The previous UK government, in which Miliband was energy minister, cut climate finance to developing countries to pay for increases in military spending.
The UK government led by new Prime Minister Andy Burnham has yet to outline any major changes to climate finance in its two weeks in power but has announced it will convert some finance from grants to loans in order to free up money to subsidise bus travel in England.
More adaptation needed
Guterres said that “it is time to stop treating each disaster as an isolated tragedy and recognise the systemic risk that is unfolding before our eyes.” A recent study found that three-quarters of UK media reports about the British June heatwave did not mention climate change.
As well as reducing emissions, the UN Secretary-General called for measures to adapt vulnerable people to extreme heat. Specifically, he said that buildings should be built and retrofitted for extreme heat and that every city and country should have heat-health action plans and early warning systems. Over 250 cities have joined the UN’s ‘beat the heat’ initiative, he said.
The Portuguese diplomat called for governments and employers to do more to protect their workers from heat, criticising global fashion brands for not setting heat standards for the factories that supply them. “No one should have to risk their life to earn a living,” he said.
The post UN chief warns climate crisis “in overdrive” as El Niño threatens to fuel the fire appeared first on Climate Home News.
UN chief warns climate crisis “in overdrive” as El Niño threatens to fuel the fire
Climate Change
‘Ride the wave of momentum’: Australia announces once-in-a-decade Marine Parks Network review
In response to the federal government announcing its once-in-a-decade review of Australia’s Marine Parks Network, the following lines can be attributed to Elle Lawless, Senior Campaigner at Greenpeace Australia Pacific:
“Greenpeace Australia Pacific welcomes today’s announcement that the Albanese Government will review Australia’s Commonwealth Marine Parks Network. This is a rare, once-in-a-decade opportunity to strengthen our marine parks and ban industrial fishing in Australia’s marine protected areas.
“Australians would be appalled to know that more than half of Australia’s Marine Parks Network currently allows for extractive industries, like longlining, bottom trawling and oil and gas mining. These so-called ‘protected’ areas were designed to safeguard our beloved ocean wildlife and underwater ecosystems – that is what Australians expect. Damaging industrial industries should not be given a free pass to trawl, fish, drill or extract from our marine parks.”
“With the first Ocean COP just around the corner, and off the back of Australia’s move to ratify the Global Ocean Treaty earlier this year, the Australian government has a unique opportunity to ride the wave of this momentum and solidify itself as a true global ocean leader.
“Greenpeace Australia Pacific is calling for industrial activities to be banned from our protected waters and for at least 30% of Australia’s ocean to be protected as ocean sanctuaries. This review presents a rare opportunity to create more ocean sanctuaries, true blue havens where ocean life can recover, thrive and repopulate the surrounding waters.”
—ENDS—
‘Ride the wave of momentum’: Australia announces once-in-a-decade Marine Parks Network review
In recent days, prominent climate sceptics and rightwing commentators have shared charts on social media incorrectly implying that Europe is having its “quietest” year for wildfires in 2026.
These include Dr Matthew Wielicki, a former University of Alabama geochemist and self-described “professor in exile”, who was recently appointed by the Trump administration to lead the US Global Change Research Program.
However, these charts paint a misleading picture as they are skewed by encompassing the entirety of Russia in the data – including the vast plains of Siberia.
These charts also use data that include fires that are deliberately lit to manage cropland, which is a declining practice across much of Europe.
In this factcheck, Carbon Brief shows that the area burned by wildfires across the European Union in 2026 is second only to 2022 for this time of year.
The latest data from the European Forest Fire Information System (EFFIS) also shows that France has set a new modern record for area burned and Spain’s wildfire season is among the worst on record.
The fires have displaced more than a third of a million people across south-western Europe, while an impending heatwave has also raised fears of the fires worsening in the coming days.
‘Quietest year’
On 27 July, as wildfires raged across multiple European countries, former Conservative peer and climate-sceptic commentator Matt Ridley posted on Twitter that “2026 is the quietest year for wildfires in Europe by some distance”.
Ridley, who sits on the academic advisory council of the Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF), a UK-based climate-sceptic lobby group that refuses to reveal the sources of its funding, was responding to an article by Daily Telegraph columnist Tim Stanley.
Stanley’s column, headlined: “Climate change is real – and the right needs to get serious about it”, warned:
“This is no longer a matter of speculation: the wildfires of Europe, pitiless and persistent, are the way we live now.”
Ridley included a chart from Our World In Data, showing the cumulative area burned by wildfires by week for Europe. The chart puts 2026 as having the smallest area for this time of year in a dataset going back to 2012.
Ridley’s post was widely shared by prominent rightwing figures – including Richard Tice, deputy leader of the hard-right, climate-sceptic Reform UK party, former Conservative cabinet minister Jacob Rees-Mogg and multiple commentators.
Separately, Wielicki also shared a chart on Twitter to imply that wildfires in Europe are declining. Wielicki has previously claimed that the “science is not settled on climate change”.
The charts posted by Ridley and Wielicki both use data from the Global Wildfire Information System (GWIS). The GWIS category for “Europe” encompasses all the countries on the continent and includes the whole of Russia.
As a result, Russia accounts for about 74% of the area included in the GWIS definition of “Europe”.
Wildfires in Russia typically account for 80-90% of the burned area in the GWIS Europe dataset. In 2026, fires in Russia are substantially below average. Therefore, including Russia in this comparison creates the false impression that wildfire activity across Europe is unusually low.
Dr Calum Cunningham, a research fellow at the University of Tasmania’s Fire Centre, says that such claims are “highly misleading”, noting that “they rely on aggregating fire activity across an enormous and climatically diverse region”. He tells Carbon Brief:
“A relatively quiet season in Russia can easily mask an exceptionally active season in France or Spain. If the analysis is focused on the regions actually experiencing the current fires, the picture is very different.
“The reality is that western Europe has experienced an extraordinary sequence of climate conditions this year.”
In contrast, the EFFIS provides a subset of wildfire data specifically for the area covered by the 27 nations of the EU, which, therefore, excludes Russia.
Another difference between the two datasets is that GWIS monitors all fires – including those on agricultural land that are intentionally set alight. The burned area as measured by GWIS contains significant cropland area.
By contrast, EFFIS uses land-cover data and other information to filter specifically for forest fires.
Looking at the EU-only data from EFFIS reveals that Europe is far from having its “quietest” year. The bloc’s burned area, as of 29 July, is almost 435,000 hectares (ha) – second only to 2022 for this time of year.
Notably, Wielicki has actually continued to post charts based on GWIS data, even after acknowledging that “includ[ing] all of Russia, including vast areas of Siberia…isn’t a good proxy for Europe”.
French fires
Even looking at EU-wide data misses the scale of this year’s wildfires for some individual countries.
The chart below shows the surge in burned area in France since mid-July.
For much of the first half of the year, the country was having a wildfire season that was only slightly above average in terms of total burned area. However, a notable uptick began in the first week of July.
The third week of the month saw France break its previous cumulative annual record by more than 19,000ha. That gap has widened as the fires continue to burn; as of 29 July, the cumulative burned area in France during 2026 was nearly 24,700ha above the previous record.
The fires in France follow a record-breaking June heatwave that “dried out vegetation across the region, allowing fires to spread quickly”, wrote the New York Times.
On 27 July, French president Emmanuel Macron called a “crisis cabinet meeting” in order to address the fires “ravaging several areas of south-west France”, said France 24.
More than 220,000 people have been evacuated due to the Gironde fire, west of Bordeaux, in “what may be France’s largest peacetime evacuation”, reported the Associated Press.
In the Conversation, Cunningham and two other University of Tasmania researchers write that evacuation orders “protec[t] human lives, but makes it more likely houses and other structures will burn if there’s no one to defend them”. They add:
“There is little doubt climate change has made France and Spain’s wildfires worse. They represent yet another reason to redouble our efforts to tackle climate change and stabilise our climate.”
Central Spain scorched
While Spain’s fire season has not broken records in the same way that France’s has, it is on track to be among the worst since EFFIS began reporting data in 2006.
The chart below shows the rapid increase in burned area in Spain since 8 July. The latest data from EFFIS reveal that, as of 29 July, Spain has almost matched its previous record at this point in the year. It is also nearly five times the average area burned for this time of year.
In Spain, the wildfires have been concentrated in the central part of the country, near Madrid.
BBC News reported that the fires outside the capital have burned “an area more than twice as large as the city itself”.
Nearly 90,000 people were forced from their homes in central Spain by the fires, said the Associated Press.
Pedro Sánchez, Spain’s prime minister, called the fires a “painful expression” of climate change.
Meanwhile, the UK, French and Spanish governments have issued joint statements this week in response to the fires. The UK/Spain statement begins:
“This summer’s wildfires demonstrated that climate change was now a national security emergency facing Europe and threatening our way of life.”
Related
The post Factcheck: No, Europe is not having its ‘quietest’ year for wildfires appeared first on Carbon Brief.
Factcheck: No, Europe is not having its ‘quietest’ year for wildfires
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