Irrevocable Carbon

Irrecoverable carbon is a term popularized by the recently released global study by Noon et al., 2021. It refers to sites on Earth that are vast storehouses of carbon, but if lost or degraded, will be impossible to recover back even in a net-zero world. The study identified these hotspots which mostly fall over mangrove, peatland and old-growth forests and are in danger from degradation by human activities. It is estimated that there is 139bn metric tons of irrecoverable carbon held in ecosystems around the world that we simply cannot destroy without the risk of all of this carbon being released and creating a catastrophe