Temporary land carbon storage can avoid slow-responding climate changes

Nature-based carbon removal and storage is central to many net-zero commitments, yet its durability is uncertain due to disturbance risks such as wildfires and deforestation. Even if carbon is stored only temporarily however, this storage can still produce climate benefits, such as by lowering peak warming in net zero scenarios. Previous work shows that carbon storage-years (the time-integrated quantity of land carbon storage) are proportional to time-integrated avoided warming, which in turn causes avoided changes in slow-responding climate variables. Here we show that this proportionality between carbon storage-years and avoided changes in inertial climate variables holds across a wide range of removal amounts and emissions scenarios. Carbon storage-years scale quasi-linearly with avoided changes in permafrost carbon, ocean carbon, AMOC, ocean temperature, and thermosteric sea-level rise. Temporary carbon storage therefore has climate benefits that extend beyond the duration of the storage itself, with some persistence of benefits even on multi-century timescales.