#CO2Emission #Sequestering #Reduction #Avoidance #ClimateChange #EnvironmentalImpact
Understanding the Importance of CO2 Emission Sequestering
In a world grappling with the effects of climate change, the debate around CO2 emission sequestering has gained significant traction. 🌍💨 But is it really true that sequestering CO2 is useless, and should we solely focus on reduction or avoidance? Let’s delve deeper into this complex issue to unravel the truth behind it.
The Role of CO2 Emission Sequestering
1. **Mitigating Climate Change**: Sequestering CO2 involves capturing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and storing it in various ways, such as underground geological formations or forests. This process effectively helps in reducing the greenhouse gas concentration in the atmosphere, thus combating global warming and climate change.
2. **Complementing Reduction and Avoidance**: While reducing and avoiding CO2 emissions are crucial strategies in combating climate change, sequestering plays a vital role in offsetting the remaining emissions that are difficult to eliminate entirely. It acts as a supplementary measure to achieve carbon neutrality.
Effectiveness of CO2 Sequestering
– **Long-Term Impact**: Properly executed CO2 sequestering can have a lasting impact on reducing atmospheric carbon levels, contributing to a sustainable environment for future generations.
– **Technology Advancements**: Innovations in carbon capture and storage technologies are making sequestering more efficient and cost-effective, further enhancing its viability as a climate change mitigation strategy.
Why a Comprehensive Approach is Essential
– **Synergy**: Combining CO2 sequestering with emission reduction and avoidance strategies creates a comprehensive approach that maximizes the effectiveness of climate change mitigation efforts.
– **Diversification**: Relying solely on reduction and avoidance may not be sufficient to achieve ambitious climate goals. A diversified approach that includes sequestering enhances the overall resilience of our environmental efforts.
In conclusion, while prioritizing CO2 emission reduction and avoidance are paramount in addressing climate change, CO2 sequestering should not be dismissed as useless. It plays a crucial role in complementing these strategies and achieving a holistic approach towards combating global warming. Embracing a comprehensive mindset that includes all these elements is key to creating a sustainable future for our planet. 🌿🌞 #SustainableFuture #ClimateAction #CarbonNeutrality
First, it’s worth starting with the point that “CO2 emission sequestering” in a general sense includes *a lot* of different potential activities. Some of these could be classified as “natural climate solutions (NCSs)” (sensu [Griscom et al., 2017](https://www.pnas.org/doi/abs/10.1073/pnas.1710465114)), which basically refers to land management practices that can lead to reduction in atmospheric carbon, and forest-based solutions (i.e., what you’re asking about) are a large part, but not the only form, of NCSs (e.g., [Roe et al., 2019](https://www.nature.com/articles/s41558-019-0591-9)). However, there are a variety of other sequestration methods, some also biologic (e.g., iron fertilization of the oceans – e.g., [de Baar et al., 2005](https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1029/2004JC002601), but the extent to which it would be effective is unclear – e.g., [Tagliabue et al., 2023](https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/gcb.16854)) and various flavors of [geologic sequestration](https://pubs.usgs.gov/fs/2010/3122/pdf/FS2010-3122.pdf). I’ll focus the rest of this mainly on forest-based solutions for sequestering since that seems like what you’re asking about.
As highlighted in the Griscom et al. and Roe et al. papers linked above, a variety of strategies for land use and management changes related to forests (e.g., protecting existing forests, reclaiming previously forested land and re-establishing, etc.) are suggested to be impactful sequestration techniques. The general idea behind this is largely focused on the ability of forests to extract carbon (i.e., CO2) from the atmosphere and sequester it in soil (e.g., [Sedjo & Sohngen, 2012](https://www.annualreviews.org/content/journals/10.1146/annurev-resource-083110-115941)), i.e., the idea is less about the biomass of the extant forest (which is of course an important part of the process), but rather how much of that biomass doesn’t make it back into the atmosphere after the plant dies and decomposes and the assumption that soil carbon is a relatively long-lived carbon sink.
As with pretty much any proposed sequestration method, the devil(s) are in the details. Since the utility of forests as a carbon sink rides on how much of that carbon makes it into soil carbon and how long that soil carbon stays sequestered, details like the type of forests and their longevity matter a lot (e.g., [Jandl et al., 2007](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0016706106002734)). Forest-based solutions also have to be considered in context of various limits, e.g., soil is not a bottomless pit for carbon sequestration and if reforestation displaces necessary agriculture it may actually be a net harm (e.g., [Powlson et al., 2011](https://bsssjournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/j.1365-2389.2010.01342.x)). There are also some very real challenges for forest-based solutions being successful within the context of ongoing climate change (i.e., it may have been more effective if we had started it earlier, but now, it’s hard). For example, trying to rely on forest-based solutions and sequestration of carbon in soils can be pretty challenging in the context of climate change related shifts in conditions, e.g., increasingly frequent wildfires, among many others (e.g., [Anderegg et al., 2020](https://www.science.org/doi/full/10.1126/science.aaz7005)).
So it is useless? No. Is it a single solution to climate change? Also, emphatically, no. Expanding briefly back to the broad menu of carbon sequestration options, none of them would be effective on their own, i.e., they all pretty much lack the capacity to drawn down atmospheric CO2 if that’s the only strategy employed. Similarly, they all are (much) less effective if not coupled with reduction/cessation of emissions since our ability to conduct any of them at the necessary to scale to both keep up with current *and* reduce atmospheric concentration is severely limited. Basically any of the sequestration methods have some pretty large critical flaws, e.g., for geologic storage – is there actually the storage capacity and can you inject safely? For mineral carbonation – what scale of mining is required to actually have enough minerals to react enough carbon for it to work? For ocean iron fertilization – does it actually work at scale and/or what are the potential side effects? And for forest-based solutions – how long does soil carbon stay soil carbon and is there actually enough land (not needed for agriculture, etc.) for it to work at the necessary scale? Most of them can work to some extent, but probably none of them can work alone.
**TL;DR** Like most of these types of questions, there’s nuance and that nuance is *critically important*. It can be simultaneously true that sequestration strategies (like forest-based solutions) can be an important and useful part of climate change mitigation strategies *AND* that they are insufficient to fully mitigate climate change without reductions in (and really cessation of) emissions. Treating any of these as a strict either / or ignores this nuance is not a useful framing of the scale of the problem and the complexity of the solution.
In one sense there is no amount of tree planting that can deal with pulling ancient carbon out of the ground. The problem is the vast majority (99.99%) of all the carbon we are using and dumping into the atmosphere is ancient and has nothing to do with trees. To truly sequester it we should put it back where it came from i.e. into the ground/rock from whence it came. This, as we’ve discovered, is very expensive and difficult so far.