Supplement to "Climate policies for carbon neutrality should not rely on the uncertain increase of carbon storage in existing forests"

Supplementary data to "Climate policies for carbon neutrality should not rely on the uncertain increase of carbon storage in existing forests"This dataset contains data on potential biomass at global scale at 10 km resolution under current and future climate scenarios, discussed in the paper Climate policies for carbon neutrality should not rely on the uncertain increase of carbon storage in existing forests. In the paper we make the distinction between potential realised biomass, i.e. the maximum biomass expected under given environmental conditions (climate, topography and soil), and biomass carrying capacity, which is potential biomass adjusted for naturally occurring disturbance regimes. For details, see the material and methods section of the paper.
This dataset provides potential realised biomass (PRB) and natural disturbance regimes (DR) for current (1970-2000) and future climate conditions (2081-2100), with 3 future climate scenarios (SSP1-2.6, SSP2-4.5 and SSP3-7.0) with the future climate being derived by 23 Earth system models. The climate data is sourced from the WorldClim V2.1 dataset1. The dataset presented here reports the same climate models, and a subset of the periods and scenarios.
The filenames in this repository are created in the following way:
current climate:
{variable}_current_climate.tif
future climate:
{variable}_{climate model}_{climate scenario}_{climate period}.tif
Biomass carrying capacity can be calculated with the following formula. For more details and a description on how to derive the CO2 fertilization parameter (FCO2) we refer to the methods section in the paper.
BCC = PRB * (1 - DR) * FCO2
Climate modelsSee https://www.worldclim.org/data/cmip6/cmip6climate.html
Climate scenariosSSP1–2.6: Sustainability. Low GHG emissions: CO2 emissions cut to net zero around 2075
SSP2–4.5: Middle of the road. Intermediate GHG emissions: CO2 emissions around current levels until 2050, then falling but not reaching net zero by 2100
SSP3–7.0: Regional rivalry. High GHG emissions: CO2 emissions double by 2100
Climate periodsOne period of the WorldClim V2.1 dataset is used: 2081-2100.
References1. Fick, S. E. and Hijmans, R. J.: WorldClim 2: new 1-km spatial resolution climate surfaces for
global land areas, International Journal of Climatology, 37, 4302–4315, https://doi.org/10.1002/joc.5086, 2017.