Characterizing and predicting carbon emissions from an emerging land use perspective: A comprehensive review

Abstract

Global warming has heightened the focus on carbon emissions. The IPCC 2023 Special Report: Climate Change and Land highlights the emerging field of land use-based carbon emissions characterization and prediction. This comprehensive review compares the advantages of Land Use and Land Cover Change in carbon emissions characterization and prediction against traditional methods. Using bibliometrics, the review analyzes the international attention, disciplines, and keywords of this field, revealing its division into methodological and empirical research. From the methodological perspective, the review summarizes key methods and core nodes, highlighting the limitations of existing frameworks and offering future outlooks. From the empirical perspective, it outlines carbon reduction strategies related to land use. The main conclusions include: 1) This emerging field offers several advantages, including high-precision data acquisition, spatial mapping of emissions, long-term predictive capabilities, real-time emission characterization, and the development of specific, controllable mitigation strategies; 2) It is advancing with technological progress and interdisciplinary collaboration, gaining global attention; 3) The field is divided into four directions, with emerging keywords identified for each, indicating that innovative methods will attract future attention; 4) Methodological goals include efficient land use subdivision, robust and interpretable regression modeling, and high-performance simulation model development; 5) Empirical research shows that land use planning, urban form control, and carbon reduction technologies reduce emission intensity, with broad applications and evaluations crucial for future research.