Without Land-Based Cuts the 1.5 Degree Target Fails: Potsdam Study in Nature Sustainability Quantifies Energy and Land Trade-Offs
A study from the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, published in Nature Sustainability, quantifies for the first time the interrelationships and competing objectives of two major areas of greenhouse gas reduction: phasing out fossil fuels and measures on natural land such as farmland, forests and wetlands. Leon Merfort is lead author.
Land-based climate protection includes cultivating biomass for biofuels or carbon removal, protecting ecosystems, restoring forests, soils, wetlands and peatlands as carbon sinks, and reducing methane and nitrous oxide emissions in agriculture.
Using a model integrating the economy, the energy system, land use and climate, the team calculated scenarios with varying land-sector measures. One key finding is that without a significant contribution from land-based reductions, limiting global heating to 1.5 degrees Celsius by 2100 after a temporary overshoot can no longer be achieved.
For an illustrative target of 1.7 degrees with a global carbon price as the energy transition tool, the price would have to rise to 400 dollars per metric ton of carbon dioxide by 2040 if no land-based measures are implemented, with consumption losses of 3.5 percent between 2025 and 2100. With every possible land measure taken, the same target is reachable at 130 dollars per ton and a 1.3 percent consumption loss.
The study also notes that land required for climate-protection biomass in 2050 would then range from 66 million hectares to just over 300 million hectares. For scale, France covers 63 million hectares and Argentina 278 million hectares.
The team recommends a cautious policy mix: energy recovery using residual materials, a limited amount of cultivated biomass, capped pricing for methane and nitrous oxide, and comprehensive global forest conservation. Under that mix, the model reaches the 1.7 degree target at a 2040 carbon price of 180 dollars and a 1.5 percent consumption loss. The paper carries digital object identifier 10.1038/s41893-026-01977-7.
Published by GSM · USA (original Chinese edition)
Photo: 图：航拍下一片为种植园新清理出的土地。T. R. Shankar Raman 摄，CC BY-SA 4.0，经 Wikimedia Commons / Photo: Oil Palm clearing aerial Borneo. By T. R. Shankar Raman, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
Penn State Photochemical Method Converts Sulfonamides to Anilines Without Added Catalysts: GSK Calculations Suggest More Than 90 Percent of Commercial Sulfonamides Could Be Modified2026-11-11
University of the Witwatersrand Demonstrates Transverse Faraday Effect in Multimode Fiber: Speckle Similarity Falls to About 84 Percent at 0.24 Tesla, Published in Optics Letters2026-11-11