Dynamics of Land Use and Carbon Emissions in the Context of Carbon Neutrality and Carbon Peaking, Volume II

This Research Topic is Volume II of a series. The previous volume, which has attracted over 29k views can be found here:
Dynamics of Land Use and Carbon Emissions in the Context of Carbon Neutrality and Carbon Peaking

The objective of achieving carbon neutrality serves as a crucial guiding principle in addressing the global issue of climate change and fostering sustainable economic growth and ecological harmony. Carbon emissions from land use account for 10% of the total global carbon emissions. It is an important carbon source and sink of the earth system. Therefore, optimizing the land spatial pattern is one of the important means to promote carbon neutralization. In 1997, Kyoto Protocol emphasized that countries could improve carbon sink capacity, reduce carbon emissions, and practice climate governance through afforestation, forest management and farmland management. In this context, countries worldwide should actively optimize the land spatial pattern, enhance the carbon sink capacity of terrestrial ecosystems, and build a low-carbon land use structure and land spatial pattern system.

There are mainly four types of territorial space conflicts. The first is the conflict of development space, which is a vicious expansion of urban space caused by excessive dependence on GDP. The second is the conflict of land use space, which is mainly reflected in the overlapping contradiction between cultivated land space and ecologically fragile space. The third is the conflict caused by the disharmony of element space. The fourth is the conflict of planning space, characterized by the contradiction between ecological and construction spaces. According to the IPCC report on the relationship between climate change and land, the management mode of natural resources, the transformation of space use, and the improper allocation of factors will cause carbon sink profits and losses. On the one hand, land-use carbon emissions may be the effect of land use control, on the other hand, it may also be caused by man-made carbon emissions.

In view of the land space conflict, based on the temporal and spatial characteristics of carbon source/sink, it is necessary to optimize the support, damage, recovery, and development of land space from four aspects: development and construction critical point, environmental disaster sensitive point, resource ecological fragile point and social welfare balance point, to optimize the land space pattern. Thereby, the objectives of this Research Topic are (1) to clarify the relationship between land use and carbon cycle;(2) to understand and measure the process of carbon source/sink occurrence of individual land elements;(3) to develop land optimization strategies under the Carbon Neutrality and Carbon Peaking goals.

For this Research Topic, we invite papers focusing on, but not limited to, the following topics within the science-policy interface:
• Carbon sink capacity improvement
• Carbon sink impact assessment
• Territorial spatial control of carbon sink space
• Construction of land pattern system with low efficiency emission
• Determination of land use carbon emission standard