To constrain global warming, we must strongly curtail greenhouse gas emissions and capture excess atmospheric carbon dioxide1,2. Regrowing natural forests is a prominent strategy for capturing additional carbon3, but accurate assessments of its potential are limited by uncertainty and variability in carbon accumulation rates2,3. To assess why and where rates differ, here we compile 13,112 georeferenced measurements of carbon accumulation. Climatic factors explain variation in rates better than land-use history, so we combine the field measurements with 66 environmental covariate layers to create a global, one-kilometre-resolution map of potential aboveground carbon accumulation rates for the first 30 years of natural forest regrowth. This map shows over 100-fold variation in rates across the globe, and indicates that default rates from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)4,5 may underestimate aboveground carbon accumulation rates by 32 per cent on average and do not capture eight-fold variation within ecozones. Conversely, we conclude that maximum climate mitigation potential from natural forest regrowth is 11 per cent lower than previously reported3 owing to the use of overly high rates for the location of potential new forest. Although our data compilation includes more studies and sites than previous efforts, our results depend on data availability, which is concentrated in ten countries, and data quality, which varies across studies. However, the plots cover most of the environmental conditions across the areas for which we predicted carbon accumulation rates (except for northern Africa and northeast Asia). We therefore provide a robust and globally consistent tool for assessing natural forest regrowth as a climate mitigation strategy.

中文翻译：

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绘制全球天然森林再生的碳积累潜力

为了抑制全球变暖，我们必须大力减少温室气体排放并捕获过量的大气二氧化碳1,2。重新种植天然林是捕获额外碳的重要策略 3，但对其潜力的准确评估受到碳积累率的不确定性和可变性 2,3 的限制。为了评估速率不同的原因和位置，我们在这里汇编了 13,112 个碳积累的地理参考测量值。气候因素比土地利用历史更能解释速率的变化，因此我们将实地测量与 66 个环境协变量层结合起来，创建了一个全球一公里分辨率的天然林再生前 30 年潜在地上碳积累速率图. 这张地图显示了全球范围内的比率变化超过 100 倍，并表明政府间气候变化专门委员会 (IPCC)4,5 的违约率可能将地上碳积累率平均低估 32%，并且没有捕捉到生态区内八倍的变化。相反，我们得出的结论是，由于对潜在新森林的位置使用了过高的比率，天然森林再生的最大气候缓解潜力比之前报告的低 11%。尽管我们的数据汇编包括比以前的工作更多的研究和站点，但我们的结果取决于数据可用性（集中在 10 个国家/地区）和数据质量（因研究而异）。然而，这些图涵盖了我们预测碳积累率的地区（北非和东北亚除外）的大部分环境条件。