Links between climate change and land use are in the news around the world this week following the publication of a special report on the topic by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). A recent paper published in Global Change Biology conducts an in depth scientific investigation of the interactions between climate and land use change in the state of California. The authors used ST-Sim software to build an integrated model of landscape change and carbon dynamics that estimated carbon stocks and fluxes for California’s forest, grassland, shrubland, and agricultural ecosystems. Carbon storage in California’s terrestrial ecosystems was projected to decline in nearly all of the 32 alternative future scenarios considered but there were large uncertainties associated with these projections stemming from underlying uncertainties about increasing CO2 and its effect on ecosystem carbon storage and flux.