Effects of land use and land cover change on carbon sequestration and adaptive management in Shanghai, China

Achieving well-being for all, while mitigating climate change, is a central idea in the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and one of the most pressing global challenges. Land use and land cover change are affecting the global and regional climate change through the carbon emissions. Meanwhile, carbon sequestration could replenish and contribute to the decrease of CO2 emissions. Rapid urbanized areas have typical urbanized characteristics and carbon reduction target. Therefore, it is a vital issue to explore the carbon sequestration in rapid urbanized area. This paper analyzed the mechanism between carbon sequestration and land use and land cover change in Shanghai city. Based on the Landsat TM/ETM images from 1990 to 2015 and using the InVEST model, we assessed the temporal and spatial variations of carbon sequestration in response to the expansion of built-up areas and obtained a reliable estimate of terrestrial carbon sequestration at 30 m x 30 m grid scale, including biomass and soil carbon stocks. The results show that the total carbon stock decreased by 73.19 x 105 t during the period 1990-2015, representing 0.48% per year. The urbanization process in response to land use and land cover change has significant negative impacts on carbon sequestration capacity in the urban ecosystem. According to these results, some potential policy measures are proposed for mitigating terrestrial carbon losses for Shanghai, which are mainly manifested in adaptive management for carbon sequestration, contributing to achieve SGDs and sustainable development.