Year: 2017

Li, Yongfu; et al. (2017): Effects of biochar application in forest ecosystems on soil properties and greenhouse gas emissions. A review

Li, Yongfu; Hu, Shuaidong; Chen, Junhui; Müller, Karin; Li, Yongchun; Fu, Weijun et al. (2017): Effects of biochar application in forest ecosystems on soil properties and greenhouse gas emissions. A review. In J Soils Sediments 202–203 (Part 2), p.[nbsp]183. DOI: 10.1007/s11368-017-1906-y.

“Here, we review and summarize the available literature on the effects of biochar on soil properties and GHG emissions in forest soils.”

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Meritt Herald: Coral Reefs, assisted evolution and geo-engineering

The word for this, if we are being honest, is ‘geo-engineering.’ It’s a very gentle, low-tech kind of geo-engineering, with relatively little chance of major negative side-effects if we get it wrong. We are definitely still on the learner slopes. The interventions in natural systems will get much bigger, and the penalties for mistakes much more costly, as time goes on.

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Conservation news: Fighting climate change with bioenergy may do ‘more harm than good’

“A major source of energy oft-extolled as renewable is biomass from trees, which are usually harvested from managed forests either established on land that has already been deforested or planted where forests didn’t naturally grow. But a new study finds land-use like managing forests for biomass production may come at a much higher carbon cost than previously thought.”

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Erb, Karl-Heinz; et al. (2017): Unexpectedly large impact of forest management and grazing on global vegetation biomass

Erb, Karl-Heinz; Kastner, Thomas; Plutzar, Christoph; Bais, Anna Liza S.; Carvalhais, Nuno; Fetzel, Tamara et al. (2017): Unexpectedly large impact of forest management and grazing on global vegetation biomass. In Nature. DOI: 10.1038/nature25138.

“Therefore, avoiding deforestation is necessary but not sufficient for mitigation of climate change. Our results imply that trade-offs exist between conserving carbon stocks on managed land and raising the contribution of biomass to raw material and energy supply for the mitigation of climate change. Efforts to raise biomass stocks are currently verifiable only in temperate forests, where their potential is limited. By contrast, large uncertainties hinder verification in the tropical forest, where the largest potential is located, pointing to challenges for the upcoming stocktaking exercises under the Paris agreement.”

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Emmerling, Johannes; Tavoni, Massimo (2017): Quantifying Non-cooperative Climate Engineering

Emmerling, Johannes; Tavoni, Massimo (2017): Quantifying Non-cooperative Climate Engineering. Fondazione Eni Enrico Mattei (FEEM) (Working Paper, 058).

“This paper provides the first quantitative evaluation of the risks of free driving. Our results indicate that in a strategic setting there is significant over-provision (by almost an order of magnitude) of climate engineering above what is socially optimal, resulting in a sub-optimal global climate. Regions with high climate change impacts, most notably India and developing Asia, deploy climate engineering at the expenses of other regions.”

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