A Cheap, Natural Way of Cutting Greenhouse Gas

Keeping tropical forests from being cut down isn't cheap, but it's affordable -- and it might be humanity's best short-term climate change solution.

In a paper published today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, a team of economists and ecologists calculated a price of keeping CO2-gobbling tropical forests intact.

That's only the first step in conserving them, but it's an important one.

"Nobody knew how expensive or cheap it would be," said study co-author Brent Sohngen, an agricultural economics professor at Ohio State University. "Our results say it's a relatively cheap option compared to storage in deep geological wells, or trying to transform the energy economy. That's a good option in the long run, but expensive in the short term. This is a good option in the near future."

Sohngen's team calculated the costs of paying landowners to say their chainsaws using three different estimates of tropical forest area and carbon sequestration potential.

Slowing deforestation by 10% over the next twenty years would cost between $0.4 billion and $1.7 billion annually, and save about half a gigaton of CO2 yearly. A 50% deforestation drop would cost between $17 and $30 billion, and save more than two gigatons of CO2 each year -- about one-third of total United States greenhouse gas emissions.

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The Painting is by Henri Rousseau

Old-Growth Forests Help Combat Climate Change

Rare is the forest untouched by man. Whether logging or clearing land for agriculture, the bulk of the world's forests have fallen to crops, cattle or younger trees. According to some estimates, less than 10 percent of forests worldwide can be considered old growth, or undisturbed for more than a century. And that is not just a tragedy for the plants and animals that require mature forests—it is also a tragedy for the world's climate, according to a study published today in Nature.

Laborious research in the 1960s by the late pioneering U.S. ecologist Eugene Odum seemed to indicate that forests achieve a balance between the amount of carbon dioxide (CO2) absorbed by growing trees and plants and the amount of CO2 released back into the atmosphere by the decomposition of dead plant matter.

But it seems that old forests may be more efficient than previously believed. Biologist Sebastiaan Luyssaert of the University of Antwerp in Belgium and his colleagues surveyed all the existing measurements of how much carbon is absorbed and released from old-growth forests (exclusively in temperate and boreal forests due to a lack of extensive data on tropical forests). Their findings, Luyssaert says: "old-growth forests continued to accumulate carbon."

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See our earlier posting about the same matter.
The painting is by Laura Tasheiko

The joke that grew into a school forest

MOST Sydney schools have vegetable patches, rainwater tanks or solar panels, but the students of Ascham School are sure they are the only ones with their own eco-forest.

The brainchild of a year 11 student, Sarah Cohn, the forest, hopefully, will eventually be big enough to completely offset the Edgecliff school's carbon use.

It is ambitious and innovative, but it started out as just another paper recycling campaign.

"After I saw the movie An Inconvenient Truth, I started looking at Ascham and how un-environmentally-friendly it was," Sarah says. "As a student, the thing we notice most is how much paper the school uses, so I thought that was going to be one of the main problems."

But closer investigation, and a meeting with the school bursar, Bill Apter, proved otherwise. "Mr Apter showed me a pie chart of where our usage actually was and the two biggest areas were electricity and gas."

To reduce expenditure in these areas, the pair successfully campaigned to have the temperature of the school swimming pool reduced by a few degrees, dramatically reducing gas consumption. It was a good result, but they wanted more.

"I had calculated the school's carbon footprint and I jokingly said that if we turned the whole school into a forest, then we could offset all our carbon emissions," Apter says.

But Sarah took the suggestion seriously. A few weeks later she had another meeting with Apter.

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The painting is by Laura Tasheiko

Old-growth B.C. forests worth more standing than fallen, study says

VANCOUVER — Leaving British Columbia's old-growth forests standing may make more economic sense than cutting them down for timber, especially as the province looks to strategies to cut global warming, a new B.C. study suggests.

The report from Simon Fraser University challenges the status quo and uses Ministry of Forest data to show conservation wins out over logging when forests are valued for their role in capturing carbon from the atmosphere, protecting endangered species and providing opportunities for recreation.

The study backed by three environmental groups - Wilderness Committee, David Suzuki Foundation, and Ecojustice - used computer modeling to look at a variety of conservation and logging scenarios in a large tract of forest near Vancouver.

In almost every scenario, researchers say they found the value of the carbon captured and stored by the trees far outweighed the value of the lumber harvested from the logs.

Faisal Moola, science director for the David Suzuki Foundation, called the results a clear indicator that B.C. should be protecting its old-growth forest as it works with other western provinces to reduce global warming.

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See these linkls too. This and this

The painting is by Laura Tasheiko

Carbon huddles deep in the forest

Australia's old-growth forests can store up to five times more carbon than previously thought, scientists say, as they warn that natural forests are crucial in the worldwide fight against climate change.

A study on the role of natural forests in carbon storage has found that unlogged natural eucalypt forests in Australia's south-east store about 640 tonnes of carbon a hectare, while intact old-growth forests in Victoria and Tasmania store up to 1200 tonnes a hectare.

The study was carried out by the Fenner School of Environment and Society at the Australian National University.

The report's co-author, Professor Brendan Mackey, said the leading world climate change body, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, had got carbon storage levels wrong.

The scientific body said the average carbon stock in temperate forests was 217 tonnes a hectare.

The report by Professor Brendan Mackey, Heather Keith, Sandra Berry and David Lindenmayer found that natural forests stored almost three times as much carbon as plantations did.

Professor Mackey said, ''Protecting the carbon in Australia's and the world's natural forests is no longer an option: it is a necessity.''

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