Changes in the Soil Carbon Storage of South Korean Rice Paddies.

Soil plays a very important role in carbon storing, especially in the temperate zone, as it contains a great portion of carbon in the ecosystem. South Korea, which used to have large areas of forest and crop land, has been losing the soil rapidly due to fast urbanization and land development, resulting in the emission of soil carbon into the atmosphere. Rice paddies in South Korea, which are considered to be one of the major deterrents of soil carbon emission, have continued to be reduced in their areas. The present study investigated how much land of rice paddies has disappeared during the past two decades and how much soil carbon has been lost over the period, in an effort to provide basic data for developing appropriate strategies of land use management. The study finds that the area of rice paddies was reduced from about 1.34 Mha in the middle of 1980’s to about 1.10 Mha in the middle of the first decade of the 2000’s. During the same time period, the total amount of the country’s soil carbon storage dropped from 32 TgC to 25 TgC, and the trend seems to continue as the land development continues. The study suggests that appropriate land use management strategies to maximally maintain the soil carbon storage should be developed as one of the measures to deal with climate change.