Land carbon sinks in the European Union are not keeping pace with carbon neutrality expectations

Abstract

Abstract

Abstract The European Union has substantially reduced greenhouse-gas emissions since 1990, yet the land use, land-use change and forestry (LULUCF) sink has not strengthened in parallel. The EU-27 LULUCF balance was approximately −231 MtCO₂e in 2024, while the latest Member State projections indicate a remaining gap of 40–55 MtCO₂e to the binding −310 MtCO₂e target for 2030. Here, we synthesise recent assessments to examine the drivers of this weakening in the land carbon sink and their implications for the effectiveness of climate mitigation policy. Declining forest growth, increased harvesting, climate-driven disturbances, and rising biomass demand reduce net carbon uptake, with one 2040 GLOBIOM sensitivity analysis indicating an approximately 100 MtCO₂e reduction in the LULUCF sink under an additional 20 Mtoe of woody-biomass demand. Concurrently, the EU inventory reported 52.7% uncertainty in the 2022 LULUCF level and 29.4% uncertainty in its trend, while important soil-carbon dynamics remain incompletely represented. These findings indicate that current climate policy frameworks implicitly assume stable, scalable, and rapidly deliverable land-based removals, whereas land carbon sinks are dynamic, disturbance-sensitive, and constrained by biophysical limits. Addressing this mismatch requires land-removal plans to be evaluated through dependable removal capacity, combining expected annual net removal with stock change, delivery time, inventory uncertainty, disturbance and reversal exposure, and competition for land and biomass.