Tag Archive for: Soil Carbon Sequestration

2017: Agriculture Begins to Tackle Its Role in Climate Change

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Author:Georgina Gustin | Published: January 4, 2017

By allowing countries to decide how to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, the landmark Paris climate agreement opened the door to new solutions. And over the past year, many countries, particularly in the developing world, decided that an especially effective way to reach those targets is through their farms.

Nearly 80 percent of the countries said they would use agricultural practices to curb climate change, and more than 90 percent said they would use those practices in addition to changes in forestry and land use linked to farming.

“2016 has been a very good year for agriculture and climate,” said Martin Frick, director of climate, energy and tenure at the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations. “It’s become possible to finally discuss the elephant in the room.”

When climate negotiators gathered in Marrakech in November to begin mapping out the process for reaching the Paris goals, groups hosted at least 80 agriculture-focused sessions.

“Agriculture has really lagged,” said Craig Hanson, director of the food, forests and water program at the World Resources Institute. “Considering it contributes 13 percent of greenhouse gas emissions, and 24 percent of net emissions with land-use change, it’s surprising it’s taken so long…But it’s finally happening,” he said.

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What the World Can Learn From SmartSOIL, a Research Project in the European Union

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Author: Joey DeMarco | Published: January 2017

The SmartSOIL (Sustainable farm management aimed at reducing threats to SOILs under climate change) project developed options to increase soil organic carbon (SOC) in Europe. It used meta-analyses of data from long-term experiments to model the impact of different farming practices on SOC. Unfortunately, studies have shown that individual farmers are often interested in short-term financial gains from increasing productivity and less concerned about the long-term sustainability of agricultural practices. Efforts to increase SOC is known as soil carbon sequestration.

A Sustainability article published in 2015 made the issue clear, “Soil degradation is not a theoretical problem; it is actively diminishing production capacity and compromising livelihoods at this very moment.” According to the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD), one-third of the world’s 1.5 billion hectares of arable land is moderately or severely degraded, having lost either part of its structure or fertility. Soil resources are being over-exploited, degraded and irreversibly lost. Poor management practices, urbanization, industrial and mining activities, and land-use changes are causing this degradation. Further, the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) states that converting natural ecosystems to agricultural plots has released roughly 66 billion tons of SOC from the ground since 1850.

SmartSOIL’s aim has been to reverse the current degradation trend of European soils. Agricultural practices that diminish SOC threaten soil functions and the surrounding ecosystem. Soil carbon sequestration has received increasing attention due to its ability to intake atmospheric carbon. The soil is an important part of the climate change conversation. The International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) reports that concentration of atmospheric carbon dioxide has increased by nearly 40 percent since the start of the industrial era. A SmartSOIL deliverable states that on average, the calculated SOC balance on arable lands annually is negative 100 kg of carbon/hectare—a trend that needs to be reversed.

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For Carbon Sequestration, ARPA-E Banks $35 Million on the Crops of the Future

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Author: Tina Casey | Published: December 19, 2017 

The Energy Department is out with another $35 million in funding for its aptly named ROOTS carbon sequestration program, aimed at developing and deploying new crops that can solve at least two big problems at once. The crops of the future will be able to sequester carbon at a greater depth, increasing accumulation by about 50%. The new crops will also help restore soil quality, enabling farmers to sustain higher yields while — hopefully — reducing reliance on fertilizers.

ROOTS (Rhizosphere Observations Optimizing Terrestrial Sequestration) comes under the Energy Department’s cutting edge funding agency, ARPA-E. That adds a high tech twist to the act of plugging plants into the soil.

Reducing The Agriculture Soil Carbon Debt

The issue of soil “carbon debt” in the US agriculture industry hasn’t crossed the CleanTechnica radar yet, so here’s a brief explainer from the Energy Department outlining the scope of the problem:

While advances in technology have resulted in a ten-fold increase in crop productivity over the past hundred years, soil quality has declined, incurring a soil carbon debt equivalent to 65 parts per million (ppm) of atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2)…

Ouch!

The decline in soil quality creates a ripple effect that hampers the ability of the US agriculture industry to grow (so to speak lols) in a low carbon economy:

…The soil carbon debt also increases the need for costly nitrogen fertilizer, which has become the primary source of nitrous oxide (N2O) emissions, a greenhouse gas. The soil carbon debt also impacts crop water use, increasing susceptibility to drought stress, which threatens future productivity.

One particularly cost-effective solution, according to ARPA-E scientists (are you listening Rick Perry?) is to focus new crops on root systems that leverage the “photosynthetic bridge” linking plants, microbes and soil with atmospheric carbon.

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How to Save Forests? Run Them Like a Business, Says This Former Wall Street Man

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Author: Carolyn Beeler | Published: December 28, 2016 

The sun is just starting to dip toward the horizon in Indonesian Borneo, and Dharsono Hartono is standing on a fire tower, looking out over a peat forest falling into shadow.

Hartono knows that all over Indonesia, this carbon-rich type of forest is being burned or cleared for palm oil or paper pulp plantations.

But when he looks down from the fire tower with his businessman’s eye, Hartono is more interested in the soil than anything he could plant in it.

“Unlike the typical mineral soil,” Hartono says, “peat soil is actually dead wood, leaves and logs that become part of the soil.”

The layers of wood and decomposing leaves create a forest floor so thick it bounces when Hartono steps on it.

All those decomposing plants contain lots of carbon, which means peat forests store more greenhouse gases than a regular tropical rainforest.

If the forest in front of Hartono were converted to plantations like much of Borneo already has been, tons of carbon would be freed from the soil and released into the atmosphere, where it would contribute to global warming.

“It would emit about 6 million tons of carbon dioxide-equivalent,” Hartono says. “Which is in this case close to about 5 million cars a year.”

Hartono’s job is to prevent that from happening. And to make sure his company turns a profit along the way.

He is the CEO and co-founder of the Katingan Project, which manages 600 square miles of land in the Indonesian province of Central Kalimantan.

The project aims to protect the peat forest, then sell carbon credits based on the amount of greenhouse gasses they can keep sequestered in the ground.

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Some Advice for Starting Your Own Backyard ‘Carbon Farm’

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Author: Julia Franz | Published: December 22, 2016 

For visitors to Eric Toensmeier’s home in Holyoke, Massachusetts, the lush, 8-foot banana plant in the front yard is the first indication that something is unusual about his landscaping.

A walk around his stucco-covered house confirms it. In the back garden, about 300 species of perennials are thriving on just one-tenth of an acre: Raspberries, mountain mint, bamboo and bush clover all jostle for space alongside persimmon, chestnut and mulberry trees.

Toensmeier’s garden is an exercise in what is known as “carbon farming,” or the use of agriculture to remove excess carbon from the air and soil; storing it instead in trees and plants. As scientists and policy experts rush to develop ways to reduce atmospheric carbon dioxide levels, Toensmeier estimates that the carbon sequestration in his garden roughly offsets the emissions of one American adult each year.

“So, certainly the scale at which we’re doing this is not the scale which is necessary to fully address the problem,” he says, “but it’s sort of a research and development project, and it’s certainly doing more than mowing a lawn. It’s a step in the right direction.”

In his new book, “The Carbon Farming Solution,” Toensmeier explores in detail the potential for using perennial crops and agroforestry to trap carbon from the atmosphere. But as he explains, many of the techniques he’s using to sequester more carbon in his own garden have long been used to make plots of land naturally produce more food.

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4 Per 1000 Signatories Meet for 1st Time at Cop22

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Published: December 14, 2016

More than 200 organizations have already signed the “4 per 1000 Initiative: Soils for Food Security and Climate,” representing important progress for soil, agriculture and climate.

Bringing together civil society, nations, international funds and organizations was a challenge; bringing together 200 of them around a table on the question of agriculture and soils was a victory. The 4 per 1000 Initiative, launched by French Minister of Agriculture Stéphane Le Foll one year ago during the COP21 Paris climate conference, has since grown in notoriety and united for the first time its 200 members – including 37 countries – November 17th in Marrakech.

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Soil: Keeping Nutrients in Food and Carbon in the Ground

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Author: Lyndal Rowlands | Published: December 13, 2016 

Healthy soil not only makes food more nutritious it also helps keep carbon out of the atmosphere by storing it underground.

Yet around the world over 500 million hectares of soil has become degraded – leading to the loss of valuable nutrients as well as the release of carbon, speeding up the process of man-made climate change.

Climate change then in turn, affects crop productivity creating a negative cycle for farmers, Lucrezia Caon Global Soil Partnership Consultant at FAO told IPS.

“If we degrade soil they admit carbon dioxide (CO2), that fosters climate change, and climate change effects crop productivity,” she said.

IPS spoke to Caon at an event ahead of World Soil Day, which is marked on December 5.

The event focused on the special role of pulses in preserving soils.

2016 is International Year of Pulses, following on from 2015, which was the International Year of Soil.

Pulses include peas, beans, chickpeas and lentils. They are particularly popular in South Asia and Latin America.

Pulses are generally more popular in developing countries than developed countries, Caon noted.

“Seventy five percent of pulses are consumed in developing countries and only 25 percent in developed countries,” she said.

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The Regeneration at Studio Hill: A Slideshow

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Published: December 5, 2016

I had the pleasure of presenting the story of our farm—from it’s roots as a dairy in the ’30s right up to it’s current iteration as a regenerative farm—at this year’s Vermont Energy & Climate Action Network (VECAN) Conference at the beautiful Lake Morey Resort in Fairlee, Vermont.

I was joined in our workshop by Didi Pershouse of the Soil Carbon Coalition and Andrea Colnes of the Energy Action Network. Our session was put together by Paul Cameron.

Our workshop presented the side of climate change that you don’t often here in today’s discussions: hope and practical action. Didi did a wonderful job explaining and demonstrating why it is vital for us to include soil as an ally in our fight against climate change—carbon sequestration, water retention, etc.

I focused on presenting the practices we employ on our farm to sequester atmospheric carbon into the ground: management-intensive grazing, perennial tree crops, and no-till vegetables.

There are four carbon sinks on the planet: the atmosphere, the ocean, the soil, and the forests. Two of these carbon sinks are full: the atmosphere and the ocean. Two of these carbon sinks are in dire need of carbon (aka: regeneration): the soil and the forests.

To our own detriment, we earthlings only ever talk about one carbon sink: the atmosphere.

In an effort to raise awareness about the other carbon sinks on planet Earth, I gave the following slideshow showing the (reletively) immediate positive effects that can be had by restoring the natural carbon cycles of a piece of land to sequester atmospheric carbon back into the soil and the trees.

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Carbon Sequestration a Positive Aspect of Beef Cattle Grazing Grasslands

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Author: Donald Stotts | Published: December 6, 2016

Beef cattle grazing on grass pastures might not be the first thing people think of when discussing the subject of combatting greenhouse gas emissions, but it is an agricultural practice providing significant dividends to the effort.

“Environmental as well as economic sustainability are key elements of best management practices for agriculture, as most people involved in agriculture are well aware they are stewards of the land,” said Keith Owens, Oklahoma State University associate vice president for the university’s statewide Oklahoma Agricultural Experiment Station system. “Air, water, soil; we pay attention to all of them.”

In terms of greenhouse gas emissions, scientific studies have long indicated the burning of fossil fuels and land-use changes such as deforestation have led to an increase in atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide since the beginning of the industrial revolution.“Carbon dioxide atmospheric concentrations have risen from 280 parts per million prior to the industrial revolution to more than 400 parts per million today,” Owens said.Carbon sequestration – the long-term capture and storage of carbon from the atmosphere, typically as carbon dioxide – is a method of reducing greenhouse gas emissions.“Many different agricultural production practices can capitalize on carbon sequestration in both soil and biomass to reduce negative environmental effects,” Owens said. “These practices enable use of the natural carbon cycle to replenish carbon stores while reducing the amount of carbon in the atmosphere.” That is where beef producers who employ grasslands as a pasture resource come in. Research by R.F. Follett and D.A. Reed published in 2010 examined the effects of grazing on soil organic carbon storage in North American rangelands. Follett and Reed found impacts ranging from no change to up to 268 pounds of carbon stored per acre per year.

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Rising Temperatures Could Liberate Carbon From Soil

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Author: Shalini Saxena | Published: December 12, 2016

Scientists have been investigating the potential effects of climate change for years. Though many of the predicted changes are now occurring, such as loss of sea ice, accelerated sea level rise, and more extreme heat waves, not all effects are well understood.

Most of us are aware that the global temperatures are creeping upward as a result of heat trapped in the atmosphere due to greenhouse gas emissions. But we may not know the full extent of changes this rise in temperature could have on our world. In a recent investigation published in the scientific journal Nature, scientists have explored the influence of global warming on soil carbon stocks located in the earth’s soil, which is still unclear to the scientific community.

Soil carbon stocks have a role to play in climate change because of the many biological processes of organisms living in the soil. Plants, microbes, and animals that live in the soil require exchange of carbon with the atmosphere, resulting in either sequestration of carbon through processes such as photosynthesis or liberation of carbon through processes such as decay. Scientists believe that the rate of these processes could be accelerated by global warming.

In the most recent investigation, scientists compiled a global database of soil carbon stock responses to global warming using worldwide climate change experiments. The soil samples used in the analysis were collected from 49 climate change experiments spanning six biomes in North America, Europe, and Asia. The team focused on soil samples collected within the top 10 cm of soil, which contains the greatest proportion of biologically active soil carbon.

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