Climate-driven increase of natural wetland methane emissions offset by human-induced wetland reduction in China over the past three decades

Abstract

Both anthropogenic activities and climate change can affect the biogeochemical processes of natural wetland methanogenesis. Quantifying possible impacts of changing climate and wetland area on wetland methane (CH 4) emissions in China is important for improving our knowledge on CH 4 budgets locally and globally. However, their respective and combined effects are uncertain. We incorporated changes in wetland area derived from remote sensing into a dynamic CH 4 model to quantify the human and climate change induced contributions to natural wetland CH 4 emissions in China over the past three decades. Here we found that human-induced wetland loss contributed 34.3% to the CH 4 emissions reduction (0.92 TgCH 4), and climate change contributed 20.4% to the CH 4 emissions increase (0.31 TgCH 4), suggesting that decreasing CH 4 emissions due to human-induced wetland reductions has offset the increasing climate-driven CH 4 emissions. With climate change only, temperature was a dominant controlling factor for wetland CH 4 emissions in the northeast (high latitude) and Qinghai-Tibet Plateau (high altitude) regions, whereas precipitation had a considerable influence in relative arid north China. The inevitable uncertainties caused by the asynchronous for different regions or periods due to inter-annual or seasonal variations among remote sensing images should be considered in the wetland CH 4 emissions estimation.