Climate-driven risks reveal forest carbon buffers are far too small
A Nature study using forest inventories, satellites, disturbance modeling and machine learning maps 100-year reversal risk from climate-driven disturbances across CONUS forests and finds current forest-carbon buffer pools are undercapitalized by an average factor of 6.3 (range 2.2–8.0) due to higher reversal risks from wildfire, drought and insects, especially in California and the Intermountain West, signaling that offset methodologies need revision under climate change.
