Stopping deforestation, greening agriculture better than carbon capture and storage, says UNEP Report
by Michael Smith (Veshengro)
It does, does it? OMG, how new, NOT. It is mind-boggling what those scientists are capable of discovering at high cost which everyone else knew long ago.
Should it not have been obvious, without the need of spending millions on (fake) research, that reafforestation of areas and looking after our forests and woodlands on a worldwide basis, and this includes their proper management, is better than any other means of “carbon capture” and “-storage”?
Boosting investments in the conservation, rehabilitation and management of the Earth's forests, peatlands, soils and other key ecosystems could deliver significant cuts in greenhouse gas emissions and avoid even more being released to the atmosphere, a 2009 report by the UN Environment Program (UNEP) says.
Achim Steiner, UN Under-Secretary-General and UNEP Executive Director, said that tens of billions of dollars are being earmarked for carbon capture and storage at power stations with the CO2 to be buried underground or under the sea.
But, he said, that perhaps the international community is overlooking a tried and tested method that has been working for millennia, the biosphere and that by some estimates the Earth's living systems might be capable of sequestering more than 50 gigatones (Gt) of carbon over the coming decades with the right market signals.
In other words, what he is saying that forests and other such lands would be much better in carbon capture and -sequestration than anything else that could be conceived by man.
Now who would have thought?
This is something that foresters, including and especially professional commercial foresters, have told everyone for ages and ages but they have been looking at other methods. Why?
The answer to the rhetorical question is that natural ways are way too simple and cannot generate a huge profit for the companies involved in making and marketing the systems.
Aside from protecting and maintaining and preserving the forests, woods, peatlands and other such areas we must actively plant new forests and woodlands and manage our woodlands and forests in such a way that they are beneficial for carbon capture.
In addition to that we must make use of forest products and debris more rather than leaving thinnings out there in the woods as so-called habitat piles to rot away where they release the once captured carbon and in addition to that lots of methane.
While some habitat piles are needed indeed to encourage a greater fungi population most of what is claimed to be left “for the wildlife” constitutes nothing but bad and lazy forestry practices.
Let's get back to normality of a clean forest floor and of using the wood in a proper way, from burning it (carbon neutral) to making things from it (carbon negative), instead of using plastics all the time and just leaving the woods to fall apart.
© 2011
