Carbon sequestration of cropland and paddy soils in China: potential, driving factors, and mechanisms

Abstract The environmental problems caused by global warming have attracted close attention of governments and scientists all over the world. As the source and sink of atmospheric carbon dioxide, cropland soil plays an important role in the global carbon cycle. Paddy soil is a major component of global cropland, and there is growing research on its carbon sequestration potential. Based on the dynamic characteristics of soil carbon sequestration in cropland, this paper reviews and synthesizes the process and mechanism of soil carbon sequestration in cropland, discusses the driving factors of soil carbon sequestration in cropland from the perspective of crop management practices, and emphatically discusses the knowledge of soil carbon sequestration potential in paddy fields in China. The main conclusions are as follows: (1) The organic carbon content of cropland soil in China is obviously lower than the global average, and the current sequestration rate of paddy soil in China is obviously lower than the potential sequestration rate, which has great potential for carbon sequestration. Since the mid‐1980s, China's agricultural soil organic carbon (SOC) has been gradually increasing, especially the carbon sink effect of rice soil in southern China. (2) Soil and crop management practices such as conservation agriculture, irrigation, integrated nutrition management, straw returning, and crop rotation can improve input efficiency, increase SOC content in the soil carbon pool, and reduce greenhouse gas emissions. (3) The research on SOC fixation mechanism has entered the micro level of soil particles. The chemical protection mechanism of clay, the physical protection mechanism of aggregates, and the biological mechanism interact and influence each other. © 2019 Society of Chemical Industry and John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.