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COP21 and “4 per thousand” – Storing Carbon in the Soil.

December 15, 2015

COP21 and “4 per thousand” – Storing Carbon in the Soil. 

It would have been a remarkable oversight, had not our use of the land and its soils featured among the discussions about climate change mitigation in Paris at COP21. However, at the conference was hosted a side-event and official launch of the “4 per thousand” initiative, which aims to increase soil carbon over a 25 year period, with the effect of halting the annual increase in CO2 in the atmosphere. It is important to be aware of what “4/1000” means: it is not an increase in the overall soil carbon by an annual 4 grams per 1000 grams of soil as has been claimed, but an increase in the existing carbon in the topsoil by 0.4%/year. This has been described from an Australian perspective:

“Let us start with the analogy of a football field (Soccer, not rugby!). Imagine it is a fifth larger than normal – making it one hectare in size. The top layer of soil on the field, 30 cm deep, is known as the topsoil.

“Carbon is the main ingredient of organic matter, so organic matter is often referred to as ‘soil organic carbon’. In Australian soils, this organic matter makes up on average, between 1 and 3 percent of the topsoil. For the purpose of the exercise, we will assume that the topsoil on the football field contains 1.5 percent carbon. This equates to 58 tonnes of carbon in the topsoil across the whole football field.What the French Government is calling for is to increase that 58 tonnes by 0.4 percent per annum – in our imaginary football field that would equate to an increase of 0.2 tonnes (or 200 kg) of carbon in the topsoil each year.”

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Eyes down: how setting our sights on soil could help save the climate

December 1, 2015

The world’s soils store four times more carbon than its plants. 

The world’s soils could be a key ally in the fight to limit global warming to 2℃, thanks to their ability to store carbon and keep greenhouse gases out of the atmosphere.

France’s agriculture minister Stéphane Le Foll has founded an ambitious international research program, called “4 pour mille” (“4 per 1000”), which aims to boost the amount of carbon-containing organic matter in the world’s soils by 0.4% each year.

The program was launched officially today at the United Nations climate summit in Paris, with the hope to sign up as many nations as possible.

How much carbon do soils store? A lot. At about 2.4 trillion tonnes of carbon, soil is the largest terrestrial carbon pool, and the top 2 metres of the planet’s soils hold four times as much carbon as all the world’s plants. Carbon stored in soil can also stay there for a very long time relative to carbon in plants.

Thanks to recently published maps of global soil carbon stocks, we can work out how much extra carbon needs to be stored in soils (and where) in order to meet the target.

The size of the task

There are roughly 149 million square kilometres of land in the world, so if all the world’s soil carbon were dispersed evenly there would be 161 tonnes per hectare. Hitting the 0.4% target would mean increasing soil carbon stocks by 0.6 tonnes (600 kg) of carbon per hectare per year, on average.

But of course, soils around the world vary widely in carbon storage – tropical peat soils, for example, hold about 4,000 tonnes of carbon per hectare, whereas sandy soils in arid regions may only hold 80 tonnes per hectare. The type of above-ground vegetation and how quickly the soil microbes use the carbon can also affect the amount of storage. Generally speaking, only a quarter of organic matter added to soil ends up being stored as carbon in the long term.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

The Carbon Ranch

June 7, 2015

The Carbon Ranch

Novelist and historian Wallace Stegner once said that every book should try to answer an anguished question. I believe the same is true for ideas, movements, and emergency efforts. In the case of climate change, an anguished question is this: what can we do right now to help reduce atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) from its current (and future) dangerously high levels?

In an editorial published in July of 2009, Dr. James Hansen of NASA proposed an answer: “cut off the largest source of emissions—coal—and allow CO2 to drop back down . . . through agricultural and forestry practices that increase carbon storage in trees and soil.” I consider these words to be a sort of ‘Operating Instructions’ for the twenty-first century. Personally, I’m not sure how we accomplish the coal side of the equation, which requires governmental action, but I have an idea about how to increase carbon storage in soils.

I call it a carbon ranch.

The purpose of a carbon ranch is to mitigate climate change by sequestering CO2 in plants and soils, reducing greenhouse gas emissions, and producing co-benefits that build ecological and economic resilience in local landscapes. “Sequester” means to withdraw for safekeeping, to place in seclusion, into custody, or to hold in solution—all of which are good definitions for the process of sequestering CO2 in plants and soils via photosynthesis and sound stewardship.

 

The process by which atmospheric CO2 gets converted into soil carbon is neither new nor mysterious. It has been going on for millions and millions of years, and all it requires is sunlight, green plants, water, nutrients, and soil microbes. According to Dr. Christine Jones, a pioneering Australian soil scientist, there are four basic steps to the CO2/soil carbon process:

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Tracking the fate of ancient carbon in the Siberian Arctic | Ensia

November 24, 2014

Tracking the fate of ancient carbon in the Siberian Arctic | Ensia.

The Siberian Arctic is one of the most remote and pristine corners of the planet. During the brief summer season, temperatures can climb into the 90s Fahrenheit, and the seemingly endless expanse of boreal forest — or taiga — and tundra explodes with plant and animal life. Every summer since 2008, R. Max Holmes and colleagues from the Woods Hole Research Center have brought a growing international team of undergraduate and graduate students halfway around the world to the Northeast Science Station near Cherskiy, Siberia. The project, called Polaris, is designed to immerse students in the arctic environment and mentor them as they carry out their own original research on permafrost, the supposedly permanently frozen soil beneath their feet.

During the Pleistocene, about 2 million to 11,000 years ago, herds of mega-herbivores including mammoth and woolly rhinoceros grazed vast, fertile grasslands that stretched across the entire Arctic. Over thousands of years, the carbon-rich remains of this productive ecosystem were slowly compacted and frozen into the soil. The amount of carbon stored in Arctic permafrost soil is estimated to be 1,500 billion tons — more than double what is currently in our atmosphere or four times as much as all of the forests on Earth.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

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