Protected areas (PAs) are central to China's forest conservation strategy, yet their effectiveness for carbon storage across governance and management contexts remains unclear. A clearer understanding of their current and future carbon benefits is essential for informing conservation and climate policy. Here, using 1-km GEDI satellite data, we show that forests within China's PAs store on average 68.29 ± 0.17 Mg C ha⁻¹ - about 13% more than matched unprotected forests. Carbon gains are highest in national parks (18.19 ± 0.69 Mg C ha⁻¹) and in managed naturally regenerating forests (9.85 ± 0.36 Mg C ha⁻¹), although some PA categories underperform. To assess future potential, we integrate GEDI observations with CMIP6 climate projections and find that under the high-emission SSP5-8.5 climate scenario, strongly protected areas could retain an additional ~600 ± 36.39 Tg C by 2100. These results show that strong protection and optimized management substantially enhance China's carbon sink, offering major opportunities for climate mitigation and biodiversity conservation.
Fu et al. (Tue,) studied this question.