Climate & Greenhouse Gas Emissions
Carbon stock
The absolute quantity of carbon held in a reservoir — biomass, deadwood, litter, soil or ocean — at a point in time; the measurement unit of land carbon accounting.
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The quantity of carbon contained in a "pool" or reservoir at a specified time, typically expressed in tonnes of carbon per hectare or total tonnes. For forests, the IPCC framework recognises five pools: above-ground biomass, below-ground biomass, dead wood, litter and soil organic matter. Changes in stocks over time quantify emissions or removals.
References
Definition (absolute quantity in a pool at a specified time; FAO/IPCC sources).
The five IPCC forest carbon pools; inventory estimation practice.
Overview
What it means
Stock is the balance-sheet item; flux is the transaction. Land-based climate accounting (inventories, REDD+, forest carbon credits) fundamentally works by measuring stock change: a forest credit is issued only when the stock demonstrably grows relative to a baseline. Stock measurement combines field plots, remote sensing and models, with soil organic carbon often the largest and hardest pool to measure.
Disturbance — fire, logging, drought — converts stock to emission, which is why permanence and reversal buffers dominate land-credit methodology.
How it is used
National GHG inventories report stock changes in the LULUCF sector; carbon methodologies set measurement protocols per pool; conservation finance values high-stock ecosystems (old-growth forests, peatlands, mangroves) as irrecoverable-carbon priorities.
Why it matters
Carbon stocks are what climate policy on land actually protects; stock-change measurement quality determines whether forest carbon claims are real or estimated away.
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