October 14, 2026
Understanding the response of the land carbon cycle to climate and climate change is critical to the design and implementation of Australia’s plans for Net-Zero and beyond. Globally, terrestrial ecosystems remove about 25% of all carbon dioxide emissions from human activities, slowing global warming. Australia’s forests, savannas and grasslands are also doing their part in removing some of our carbon pollution, as part of natural processes and due to revegetation projects and efforts to restore degraded lands.
In addition to slowing down global warming, land carbon sinks are expected to play a larger role in the future: helping Australia to reach its Net-Zero emissions goal by 2050. Net-Zero requires a mitigation effort across the entire economy to reduce ‘net’ greenhouse gas emissions from the current 458 million tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent per year (MtCO -e yr ) in 2025 to ‘net’ zero by 2050. The ‘net’ acknowledges that not all greenhouse gas emissions can become zero because of technical barriers or
expense, particularly from some activities such as large industrial processes, the aviation sector, and livestock management. Instead, these ‘residual’ emissions will need to be offset with the direct removal of an equivalent amount of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, mostly from nature-based solutions (e.g. revegetation, improved agriculture and forestry practices, and biofuels). Australia’s Net Zero Plan expects that as much as 170 MtCO -e yr (some 30% of current emissions) might still exist by 2050
and need to be offset in this way.
Given this reliance on carbon removal, we need confidence in our understanding of how the processes driving the uptake and release of carbon (i.e. the land and ocean carbon cycle) will respond in the future, including how they will respond to changes in the climate itself. Nature-based carbon removal solutions that ignore the role of a changing climate could create future risk for Australia’s emissions reduction efforts.
Climate Systems Hub researchers are working to address this knowledge gap, with research focusing on the quantification of Australia’s current carbon budget, simulating Australia’s natural carbon cycle into the future, and completing assessments of the climate and carbon-cycle impacts of possible afforestation activity.