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Wednesday, 28 March 2012 15:27 |
By Dylan Walsh – New York Times Green Blog – March 27, 2012 Tropical forests, alongside boreal forests and wetlands, are prime ecosystems for storing carbon. Now, researchers have created a new high-resolution map of carbon storage in tropical forests that could play an important role in effective forest management. Researchers led by Alessandro Baccini at the nonprofit Woods Hole Research Center gathered two years of laser satellite, or Lidar, data to develop the image. “Lidar is very good at telling you how tall and how complex the vertical structure of the forest is,” said Dr. Baccini, an assistant researcher at the center. “If you know how tall trees are, and how many you have, then you’re very close to knowing what the carbon stock is,” he said. For full article, click here.
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Tuesday, 13 December 2011 16:41 |
By Susanna Tol, from the UN Climate Summit in DurbanWetlands International is in Durban to advocate for emissions reductions through the conservation of undisturbed peatlands as well as the rewetting of drained peat areas. Unfortunately, the negotiations on the rules for emissions reductions from land use that causes peatland drainage, such as forestry and cropland management under the follow up of the Kyoto Protocol, is not looking positive at this point. Strongly supported proposals on the table would allow countries to hide emissions from logging and only include voluntary accounting for emissions from other land uses that result in emissions. This includes the drainage of peat soils. Wetlands International campaigns for all significant sources of emissions to be mandatorily accounted for in the land use sector and no logging loopholes; therewith creating incentives to reduce emissions. For full blog post, click here.
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Tuesday, 22 November 2011 18:03 |
By Kathleen O’Neil – C&EN – September 8, 2011Coastal wetlands store nutrients such as organic carbon and nitrogen that feed the surrounding ecosystems. As the climate changes and sea levels rise, scientists expect these coastal wetlands will slowly disappear, washing away important nutrients. Now researchers estimate how much organic carbon and nitrogen Louisiana’s wetlands could lose by 2050 (Environ. Sci. Technol., DOI: 10.1021/es200909g). To read full story, click here.
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Wednesday, 13 July 2011 18:41 |
By Kristin Ohlson – Discover Magazine – June 30, 2011
Ohio State University soil scientist Rattan Lal says the agricultural soils of the world have the potential to soak up 13 percent of the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere today—the equivalent of scrubbing every ounce of CO2released into the atmosphere since 1980. The claim is a bold one, but researchers around the globe are digging up evidence that even modest changes to farming and ranching can have a major impact on carbon sequestration. For full article, click here.
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Monday, 05 December 2011 00:00 |
Steve Emmett-Mattox – Restore America's Estuaries – December 1, 2011 A new research article in Global Change Biology, "Paleoreconstruction of estuarine sediments reveal human-induced weakening of coastal carbon sinks," reports that human impacts have reduced the carbon sink potential of coastal ecosystems. "We have effectively gone back in time and monitored carbon capture and storage by coastal ecosystems, finding a 100-fold weakening in the ability of coastal ecosystems to sequester carbon since the time of European settlement. This severely hampered the ability of nature to reset the planet's thermostat." said Dr. Peter Macreadie, University of Technology, Sydney Chancellor's Postdoctoral Research Fellow. The Scientists used core samples from Botany Bay in Sydney to reconstruct the sedimentation changes in the past 6000 years, highlighting the changes in the ecology. The plant samples in the sedimentation changed as rapid industrialisation occurred around Botany Bay during the 1950s. "Unfortunately, this outcome is common to urbanized estuaries throughout the world, therefore the study adds further support for the inclusion of Blue Carbon habitats (seagrasses, saltmarshes, and mangroves) in greenhouse gas abatement schemes," concluded Dr. Peter Macreadie. (source). To go to article or to leave a comment, click here.
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Wednesday, 20 July 2011 15:19 |
by Giles Parkinson – Climate Spectator – July 20, 2011
Researchers are pushing for a new category of carbon abatement – so called “blue carbon” sinks that focuses on mangroves, tidal marshes and seagrasses – to be included in the UN clean development mechanism, the principal form of international carbon credits that Australian businesses will likely seek to access from 2015. According to Point Carbon, researchers believe blue carbon sinks could stores up to 900 million tonnes of CO2-e a year. “The rules would need to be changed to incorporate other ecosystems and activities such as salt marsh or mangrove conservation in developing countries,” Robert O’Sullivan, head of the North American office of environmental research group Climate Focus, told Point Carbon News in a interview. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is considering introducing guidance for estimating emissions and removals from coastal wetland ecosystems, such as salt marshes and seagrasses, for a report due in 2013. For full article, click here. |
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Thursday, 07 July 2011 17:32 |
By Michael Lamendola – NorthJersey.com – July 7, 2011
A new scientific endeavor that will look underneath the Meadowlands for its results is gauged to tell researchers how the Meadowlands evolved over thousands of years and how it could possibly change again in the future. Researchers are hoping the study, a joint endeavor between the Meadowlands Environmental Research Institute (MERI) and Columbia University's Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, may be a treasure trove of information on how changing climates affected the area in the past and help predict how it may in the future. It will also help environmentalists learn more about how to foster certain ecological habits that may be a tool in sequestering carbon dioxide...For full article, click here.
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