{"id":14956,"date":"2015-12-01T17:00:27","date_gmt":"2015-12-01T22:00:27","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=14956"},"modified":"2015-12-01T17:00:27","modified_gmt":"2015-12-01T22:00:27","slug":"eyes-down-how-setting-our-sights-on-soil-could-help-save-the-climate","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=14956","title":{"rendered":"Eyes down: how setting our sights on soil could help save the climate"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Eyes down: how setting our sights on soil could help save the\u00a0climate<\/a><\/strong><\/h3>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/header>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>
The world\u2019s soils store four times more carbon than its plants.\u00a0<\/strong><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
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The world\u2019s soils could be a key ally in the fight to limit global warming to 2\u2103, thanks to their ability to store carbon and keep greenhouse gases out of the atmosphere.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/section>\n<\/div>\n

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France\u2019s agriculture minister St\u00e9phane Le Foll has founded an\u00a0ambitious international research program<\/a>, called \u201c4 pour mille\u201d (\u201c4 per 1000\u201d), which aims to boost the amount of carbon-containing organic matter in the world\u2019s soils by\u00a00.4% each year<\/a>.<\/p>\n

The program was\u00a0launched officially today<\/a>\u00a0at the United Nations climate summit in Paris, with the hope to sign up as many nations as possible.<\/p>\n

How much carbon do soils store? A lot. At about\u00a02.4 trillion tonnes of carbon<\/a>, soil is the largest terrestrial carbon pool, and the top 2 metres of the planet\u2019s soils hold four times as much carbon as all the world\u2019s plants. Carbon stored in soil can also stay there for a very long time relative to carbon in plants.<\/p>\n

Thanks to\u00a0recently published maps<\/a>\u00a0of 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.<\/p>\n

The size of the task<\/strong><\/p>\n

There are roughly\u00a0149 million square kilometres of land<\/a>\u00a0in the world, so if all the world\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

But of course, soils around the world vary widely in carbon storage \u2013 tropical peat soils, for example, hold about\u00a04,000 tonnes of carbon per hectare<\/a>, whereas sandy soils in arid regions may only hold\u00a080 tonnes per hectare<\/a>. 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\u00a0a quarter of organic matter<\/a>\u00a0added to soil ends up being stored as carbon in the long term.<\/p>\n

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Eyes down: how setting our sights on soil could help save the\u00a0climate The world\u2019s soils store four times more carbon than its plants.\u00a0 The world\u2019s soils could be a key ally in the fight to limit global warming to 2\u2103, thanks to their ability to store carbon and keep greenhouse gases out of the atmosphere. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,7],"tags":[113,1408,140,1887,369,2510,1091,8487],"class_list":["post-14956","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-environment","category-survival-2","tag-carbon-emissions","tag-carbon-storage","tag-climate","tag-climate-talks","tag-global-warming","tag-paris","tag-soil","tag-the-conversation"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14956","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=14956"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14956\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":14957,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14956\/revisions\/14957"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=14956"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=14956"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=14956"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}