Boreal forests store more than double the carbon originally thought, yet policy-makers overlook their role in fighting climate change, says a report released Thursday by an international conservation group.
"For reasons that are unclear, boreal forests seem to be the carbon the world forgot," write the authors of a report published by the Seattle-based International Boreal Conservation Campaign (IBCC).
When climate change negotiators consider forests' carbon storage potential, they usually look at tropical forests because they are being logged at a faster rate than the northern boreal, said ecologist and report co-author Jeff Wells.
But soil in boreal forests — like those found in Canada's north — is much deeper than in tropical forests and hence stores much more carbon, said Wells, a visiting fellow at Cornell University.
Yet scientists have only recently taken into account the boreal's deeper soils and slower rate of decay of leaf litter, which also stores carbon.
"There were a series of estimates around 2000, 2001 that put the amount of carbon in boreal regions at between about 400 and 700 gigatonnes. And in the last year, the published estimates place it at two to three times that," said Wells. "But those 2000 to 2001 estimates have been what people have been using."
The boreal forest consists of 25 million square kilometres, or 11 per cent of the Earth's surface, and stretches from Alaska and northern Canada to Norway, Sweden and Finland, into Russia and parts of China, Korea and Japan.
Carbon in boreal forests is stored in both trees and in underlying peat and soils. The report estimates the boreal forest stores 22 per cent of all carbon on the Earth's land surface, making it the world's largest and most important terrestrial carbon storehouse.
That's significant because the more carbon that stays in the forest, the less carbon dioxide ends up in the atmosphere where it traps heat and radiates it back to Earth.
University of Victoria climate scientist Andrew Weaver, a lead author for the Nobel Prize-winning UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, reviewed the IBCC report. He said keeping carbon in place is an important part of the climate change equation.
"If you cut down the boreal forest and disturb its peatlands, you release more carbon, accelerating climate change," Weaver said in a news release.
The report's authors stress that Canada has an important role to play because much of its boreal forest is still intact. They write that Canada's boreal stores the equivalent of 26 years worth of global carbon emissions from burning fossil fuels.
"If you hold in your hands, figuratively, a huge chunk of the carbon that will decide the fate of the world, it makes it clear the policies that are put into place in Canada are going to be really important," said Wells.
As the most intact remaining forest on Earth, the boreal forest is also going to be an important refuge for plants and animals forced to shift due to climate change, he added.
In 2008, Ontario announced a plan to prohibit development and commercial activities in a 225,000-square-kilometre area of the boreal, representing about half the province's boreal forest.
Also in 2008, Quebec said it would create 23 protected nature reserves containing 18,220 square kilometres of land to shield them from any industrial activity. Much of the land is in southern Quebec and includes boreal forests.
cbc.ca
Boreal forests ignored in climate change fight
Earth's CO2 absorption not as bad as expected, controversial climate change study finds
The balance between the airborne and the fraction of absorbed carbon dioxide has stayed nearly the same since 1850. Even with CO2 emissions having risen from some 2 billion tons a year to today's 35 billion tons a year, new data shows.
This data implies that the ecosystems on Earth are much more capable to absorb CO2 than was previously believed.
These results are in opposite opinion from a large amount of research that anticipated the CO2 absorbing capacity of the ecosystems and oceans to start diminishing as the carbon dioxide emissions rose.
This would lead the greenhouse gas levels to shoot up considerably. But the fact is that the trend in the airborne fraction since 1850 has only been 0.7 plus/minus 1.4 percent per ten years, found Dr. Wolfgang Knorr at the University of Bristol. This number is pretty much equal to zero.
This work is quite important due to the climate change policy being negotiated at the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen in December. These negotiations have been based on projections that factored for the free sinking of CO2 and many researchers are pointing at evidence that the sink is already decreasing.
A change in policy could prove very costly to all countries involved. Doing so by relying on faulty data could have a very negative effect on the economy and general way of life.
The study also resulted in another erroneous estimation of deforestation emissions. Apparently, the rates may have been overestimated by up to 75 percent. These results agree with the ones published in Nature Geoscience in early November by a team led by Guido van der Werf from VU University Amsterdam.
examiner.com
European law means electric cars could speed climate change
The idea that a wholesale switch to electric cars would automatically reduce CO2 emissions and dependence on oil is one of a number of myths dispelled by a major new report.
The report, ‘How to avoid an electric shock: Electric cars from hype to reality’ was conducted by the European lobby group Transport & Environment, an organisation co-founded and supported by the ETA.
The report found that whilst there were significant potential environmental benefits to be had from a switch to electric vehicles, these were wholly dependent on changes in the way electricity was generated, energy taxed and CO2 emissions regulated. Current EU legislation contains loopholes that are likely to lead to emissions and oil use going up.
How could electric cars ‘increase’ emissions?
Binding EU targets for car CO2 emissions agreed last December include ‘super credits’ that enable carmakers to sell up to 3.5 gas-guzzling SUVs for every electric vehicle they sell and still reach their official EU target. Electric cars are also counted as ‘zero emissions’ despite the fact that the electricity they use can come from high-carbon fossil fuels such as coal
The combined effect of these loopholes would be that carmakers that choose to market electric cars to meet EU targets would have to do less to reduce emissions of conventional cars. The overall effect would be higher CO2 emissions and oil use
Director at the Environmental Transport Association (ETA), Andrew Davis, said: “Whilst the report is not intended to dampen enthusiasm for electric vehicles, their introduction should not be viewed as a panacea; significant changes to the way we produce and tax power are needed before we will reap benefits.”
eta.co.uk
Copenhagen dash for Groser as climate talks falter
Climate Change Negotiations Minister Tim Groser heads to Copenhagen next week for a last-ditch meeting of climate change ministers.
This meeting comes just three weeks ahead of the December 7-18 global summit in the Danish capital, a summit which will seek a new world treaty to combat global warming.
Describing the diplomatic efforts to get consensus at Copenhagen as "a mess", Groser is echoing most key participants in expecting there will be, at best, no more than a politically but not legally binding agreement on the next steps. "That's not because we can't move forward, but that the current way of negotiating is bogged down in a false dichotomy between the developed and developing countries."
International media reports following last week's final round of formal pre-Copenhagen negotiations, in Barcelona, suggest little progress was made. The European Union did put a price tag of up to US$148 million on the annual cost to the developed world of assisting developing economies adjust to climate change.
That's barely one-third of the upper limit of the G77 + China bid to have developed economies pledge US$200b-US$400b annually to the transition costs to a low-carbon economy in developing countries.
While international efforts are faltering, Groser says there is increasing action at a domestic level throughout the developed and developing worlds.
While the EU had been the only industrialised area to make serious progress on climate change action since the signing of the Kyoto protocol in 1997, recent action in the US, Australia, and New Zealand to introduce local climate change mitigation policies were part of a wave of global activity. "The developed world is finally into it and the developing world is starting to take this seriously, but those two worlds are far apart at the moment."
Groser hopes the Copenhagen meeting of 25 to 30 climate change ministers "can build from progress at the domestic level to some type of step at Copenhagen".
Particularly important is the bi-lateral negotiation between the United States and China out of the public eye, Groser says.
"Any agreement (at Copenhagen) must be based on an understanding between those two."
BUSINESSWIRE
