Chapter 12, Key Finding 4

Large uncertainties remain regarding soil carbon budgets, particularly the impact of lateral movement and transport of carbon (via erosion and management) across the landscape and into waterways. By 2015, cumulative regeneration of soil carbon at eroded agricultural sites and the preservation of buried, eroded soil carbon may have represented an offset of 37 ± 10% of carbon returned to the atmosphere by human-caused land-use change (medium confidence).