Moving Beyond Global Warming Potentials to Quantify the Climatic Role of Ecosystems

Abstract

For decades, ecosystem scientists have used global warming potentials (GWPs) to compare the radiative forcing of various greenhouse gases to determine if ecosystems have a net warming or cooling effect on climate. On a conceptual basis, the continued use of GWPs by the ecological community may be untenable because the use of GWPs requires the implicit assumption that greenhouse gas emissions occur as a single pulse; this assumption is rarely justified in ecosystem studies. We present two alternate metrics—the sustained-flux global warming potential (SGWP, for gas emissions) and the sustained-flux global cooling potential (SGCP, for gas uptake)—for use when gas fluxes persist over time. The SGWP is generally larger than the GWP (by up to ~40%) for both methane and nitrous oxide emissions, creating situations where the GWP and SGWP metrics could provide opposing interpretations about the climatic role of an ecosystem. Further, there is an asymmetry in methane and nitrous oxide dynamics between persistent emission and uptake situations, producing very different values for the SGWP vs. SGCP and leading to the conclusion that ecosystems that take up these gases are very effective at reducing radiative forcing. Although the new metrics are more realistic than the GWP for ecosystem fluxes, we further argue that even these metrics may be insufficient in the context of trying to understand the lifetime climatic role of an ecosystem. A dynamic modeling approach that has the flexibility to account for temporally variable rates of greenhouse gas exchange, and is not limited by a fixed time frame, may be more informative than the SGWP, SGCP, or GWP. Ultimately, we hope this article will stimulate discussion within the ecosystem science community about the most appropriate way(s) of assessing the role of ecosystems as regulators of global climate.