Schlagwort: soil carbon sequestration

Knowledge Transfer

Brief: QU.A.L.ITY soil carbon removals? Assessing the EU Framework for Carbon Removal Certification from a climate-friendly soil management perspective.

Hugh McDonald, Anne Siemons, Ralph Bodle, May Hobeika, Aaron Scheid, Lambert Schneider; Ecologic Institute, Berlin, 27 pp.

This brief critically assesses the Commission’s 2022 proposal for Framework for Carbon Removals Certification as it applies to climate-friendly soil management. The authors introduce the proposal and then evaluate how its minimum certification criteria – the so-called QU.A.L.ITY (quantification, additionality, long-term storage, and sustainability) criteria – would apply to climate-friendly soil management activities.

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New Publications

Moinet et al. (2023): Carbon for soils, not soils for carbon

Gabriel Y. K. Moinet, Renske Hijbeek, Detlef P. van Vuuren, Ken E. Giller IN: Global Change Biology, https://doi.org/10.1111/gcb.16570

The authors critically re-examine the benefits of global SOC (soil organic carbon) sequestration strategies on both climate change mitigation and food production. While estimated contributions of SOC sequestration to climate change vary, almost none take SOC saturation into account. Here, the authors show that including saturation in estimations decreases any potential contribution of SOC sequestration to climate change mitigation by 53%–81% towards 2100. In addition, reviewing more than 21 meta-analyses, they found that observed yield effects of increasing SOC are inconsistent, ranging from negative to neutral to positive. Tha authors find that the promise of a win-win outcome is confirmed only when specific land management practices are applied under specific conditions.

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New Publications

Janssens et al. (2022): Negative erosion and negative emissions: Combining multiple land-based carbon dioxide removal techniques to rebuild fertile topsoils and enhance food production

Ivan A. Janssens, Dries Roobroeck, Jordi Sardans, Michael Obersteiner, Josep Peñuelas, Andreas Richter, Pete Smith, Erik Verbruggen, Sara Vicca IN: Front. Clim., 07 September 2022, Sec. Negative Emission Technologies, https://doi.org/10.3389/fclim.2022.928403

This paper elaborates on the idea to take these CDR technologies (biochar amendment, soil carbon sequestration) a step further and use them not only to drawdown CO2 from the atmosphere, but also to rebuild fertile soils (negative erosion) in areas that suffer from pervasive land degradation and have enough water available for agriculture. This way of engineering topsoil could contribute to the fight against malnutrition in areas where crop and livestock production currently is hampered by surface erosion and nutrient depletion, and thereby alleviate pressure on intact ecosystems.

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Knowledge Transfer

Policy brief: Soils Research to deliver Greenhouse Gas Removals and Abatement Technologies (SOILS-R-GGREAT)

UK GGR Research Programme

Through new research on global croplands SOILS-R-GGREAT researchers have estimated that arable farming has produced a loss of around 25 Gt carbon relative to the natural state in 1975 but, since that time, there has been an addition of about 4Gt of soil organic carbon (SOC) due to improved agricultural practices. Alongside agricultural management, approaches such as addition of biochar or enhanced weathering of silicate rocks on soils can improve carbon storage. Researchers present possible CO₂ sequestration from these two techniques in Sao Paulo State, Brazil.

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Podcasts

Soil carbon and cover crops

by Nori – Carbon Removal Newsroom at Spotify

In this week’s science-focused episode of Carbon Removal Newsroom, hosts of Nori joined once again by co-host, the executive director of the faculty in crop and soil science at Colorado State University. They are looking at two recently published studies which explore the challenges and opportunities around managing croplands and rangelands to draw down and store atmospheric carbon while making agriculture more sustainable.

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New Publications

Nature – Pellegrini et al. (2021): Fire effects on the persistence of soil organic matter and long-term carbon storage

Adam F. A. Pellegrini, Jennifer Harden, Katerina Georgiou, Kyle S. Hemes, Avni Malhotra, Connor J. Nolan, Robert B. Jackson IN: Nature Geoscience (2021), https://doi.org/10.1038/s41561-021-00867-1

The authors review recent advances to illustrate that fire-driven changes in decomposition, mediated by altered soil organic matter (SOM) stability, are an important compensatory process offsetting declines in aboveground biomass pools. Given that 70% of global topsoil C is in fire-prone regions, using fire to promote SOM stability may be an important nature-based climate solution to increase C storage.

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New Publications

Haque, Fatima; et al. (2021): Urban Farming with Enhanced Rock Weathering As a Prospective Climate Stabilization Wedge

Haque, Fatima; Santos, Rafael M.; Chiang, Yi Wai (2021): Urban Farming with Enhanced Rock Weathering As a Prospective Climate Stabilization Wedge. In Environmental science [&] technology. DOI: 10.1021/acs.est.1c04111.

„With no single carbon capture and sequestration solution able to limit the global temperature rise to 1.5–2.0 °C by 2100, additional climate stabilization measures are needed to complement current mitigation approaches. Urban farming presents an easy-to-adopt pathway toward carbon neutrality, unlocking extensive urban surface areas that can be leveraged to grow food while sequestering CO2. Urban farming involves extensive surface areas, such as roofs, balconies, and vertical spaces, allowing for soil presence and atmospheric carbon sequestration through air-to-soil contact. In this viewpoint we also advocate the incorporation of enhanced rock weathering (ERW) into urban farming, providing a further opportunity for this recognized negative emissions technology that is gaining momentum worldwide to gain greater utilization.“

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Media

GreenBiz: U.S. infrastructure bill lays foundation for carbon management economy

„It’s not the law of the land yet, but one of the most potentially impactful aspects of the bipartisan infrastructure bill for climate techies is the groundwork it lays for new economic opportunities based on capturing and sequestering carbon emissions. The support for the so-called carbon management economy takes many shapes within the bill, and is largely based on the SCALE Act reintroduced earlier this year by senators on both sides of the aisle. (SCALE stands for Storing CO2 and Lowering Emissions).“

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