Biomass-burning emissions lead to global CO2 concentration increase: Study

BEIJING -- Chinese researchers have discovered that biomass-burning emissions are one of the key factors causing the increase of global atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations and significantly impact global climate change.

Biomass burning has substantial spatiotemporal variabilities, contributing significantly to the dynamics of global CO2 distributions and variances, said Shi Yusheng, an associate researcher at the Aerospace Information Research Institute under the Chinese Academy of Sciences.

He noted that quantifying the impacts of biomass-burning emissions on atmospheric CO2 concentrations is essential for global and regional carbon cycles and budgets.

The research team led by Shi performed several numerical experiments by switching and replacing inventories to estimate the impacts of four biomass-burning emission inventories on atmospheric CO2 concentration simulations between 2006-2010 based on the global chemical transport model, the GEOS-Chem. They also combined ground-based observation and satellite data verification to improve the simulation accuracy of the model.

Based on four different biomass-burning emission inventories, the researchers found that biomass-burning emissions could lead to a global CO2 concentration increase of 2.4 ppm annually, exceeding the annual net increase of global atmospheric CO2 concentration, according to a paper published in the journal Science of the Total Environment.

Also, the impact of biomass-burning emissions on CO2 concentrations has significant seasonal changes, and the sensitivity of CO2 concentration to biomass-burning emission inventories in different regions is also different.