Publication: The Changing Wealth of Nations: Global Estimates of Carbon Stocks in the Vegetation and Soils of Terrestrial Ecosystems
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2024-10-29
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2024-10-29
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The global climate crisis is one of the most pressing challenges of our time, exacerbating existing social and environmental issues. Regulating ecosystem services, and climate regulation in particular, plays a fundamental role in mitigating the effects of climate change. In this regard, terrestrial ecosystems play a crucial role as stocks for carbon that would otherwise be released into the atmosphere, causing further warming, as well as being potential carbon sinks. Terrestrial ecosystems, particularly forests, are thus essential to addressing the global climate crisis. For these reasons, it is important to include carbon in the World Bank’s Changing Wealth of Nations (CWON) wealth estimates. This analysis was carried out by the Basque Centre for Climate Change (BC3), which develops multidisciplinary knowledge to support decision-making on this global challenge. Within the research center, the Artificial Intelligence for Environment and Sustainability (ARIES) team developed an integrated modeling system with a platform capable of combining data and models to study the interaction of human and natural systems, with a strong focus on the environment and sustainability dimensions. More information is provided in this report to briefly describe how the modeling integration based on artificial intelligence (AI) and semantics is used to obtain results aligned with the World Bank’s CWON approach. The global model to estimate vegetation carbon stock used in this analysis quantifies how the global landscape is changing as a result of ecological transformations that occur at biophysical (environmental), social, and economic levels. In the context of the CWON program, the World Bank collaborates with the BC3 team, who developed the ARIES for System of Environmental-Economic Accounting (SEEA) platform, to create global baseline biophysical and monetary accounts of the carbon storage ecosystem service.
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“World Bank, Alessio. 2024. The Changing Wealth of Nations: Global Estimates of Carbon Stocks in the Vegetation and Soils of Terrestrial Ecosystems. © World Bank. http://hdl.handle.net/10986/42320 License: CC BY-NC 3.0 IGO.”
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