Baseline Greenhouse Gas Emissions and Removals for Forest, Range, and Agricultural Lands in California

The project described in Baseline Greenhouse Gas Emissions and Removals for Forest, Range, and Agricultural Lands in California sought to quantify the baseline of changes in carbon stocks on forest, range, and agricultural lands in California for the 1990s—filling the gaps for those sectors that existed in the 2002 California Energy Commission report, Inventory of California Greenhouse Gas Emissions and Sinks: 1990–1999. These baselines provide an estimate of the emissions and removals of GHGs attributable to changes in the use and management of land, and are useful for identifying where major opportunities could exist in California for enhancing carbon stocks and/or reducing carbon sources to potentially mitigate GHG emissions.
The analysis revealed that forests and rangelands were responsible for a net removal of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere of 7.55 million metric tons of carbon dioxide per year (MMTCO2eq/yr), and that agricultural lands were responsible for a net emission of 0.35 MMTCO2eq/yr. Non-CO2 GHG emissions from forest and range lands were estimated to be 0.16 MMTCO2eq/yr, or equivalent to about 2% of the removals by these systems. Nitrous oxide (N2O) emissions (in CO2 eq) from agricultural lands are more than 40 times higher than carbon emission due to land use change. The overall net result was a removal of 7.20 MMTCO2eq/yr by forests and 0.18 MMTCO2eq/yr by rangelands, and an emission of 14.19 MMTCO2eq/yr by agricultural land.