can be difficult for us to understand and
re-create. That program I used to figure
out the park’s carbon footprint in Hawaii
back in 2008? Its calculations for carbon
storage in landscapes were so new, and
still so unsophisticated, that some parks
didn’t yet bother to report them. (Depend-
ing on how I defined the type of forest we
had—it was a mix, but in the program I had
to choose between “wet tropical” or “dry
tropical”—the amount of carbon that the
program credited the park with removing
from the atmosphere could nearly double.)
It’s not that forests and other natural areas
can’t store a lot of carbon—they’re cur-
rently storing much, much more than is in
the atmosphere, including both what’s there
naturally and what’s human-added—it’s
that carbon moves through them in compli-
cated ways that are hard to measure. How
do you account for the natural release of
carbon when plants rot? For the widely
differing amounts of carbon that different
ecosystems hold in soils? For the ways that
climate change itself is affecting the way
that plants’ biology works and how much
carbon they can store?
You may have seen last year’s ecstatic
headlines that planting a trillion trees
could “stop” climate change (or the recent
endorsements of the idea by the World
Economic Forum and the Trump admin-
istration). In fact, the paper in question
simply asserted that many new trees could
offset more than 200 gigatons of emis-
sions, and it was followed by a series of
responses from other scientists who argued
that the authors had, pretty dramatically,
overestimated the carbon storage potential
of new trees. (The authors of the original
paper stand by their results.)
Some tree-planting schemes envision
planting them in places they do not natu-
rally grow, which brings up a host of com-
plications, such as the risk that fire or other
local disturbance regimes could destroy new
trees and negate any carbon gains, or that
covering naturally light-colored or reflec-
tive landscapes, such as grasslands, with
dark-colored trees could actually warm the
Earth faster. Well-meaning tree planters also
have to consider that some of the ecosystems
the theoretical new plantings would replace
are already sequestering sizable amounts
of carbon. Forests get lots of attention, but
they’re hardly our only options for natural
carbon sequestration. Intact grasslands, for
example, store enormous amounts of car-
bon in soil, safely away from fire. (However,grasslands are steadily being converted for
agriculture.) Peatlands, though they make up
only 3 percent of the world’s land, seques-
ter more carbon than any other type of ter-
restrial vegetation. And yet we’re constantly
draining and drying them to convert the land
to other uses, such as oil palm plantations.
When Indonesia’s desiccated peat swamp
forests burned in 2015, the region emitted
more carbon each day than did the entire
European Union.
Natural climate solutions are best
approached holistically—a chance to sup-
port nature in the work it’s already doing.
That can mean focusing on the conservation
and restoration of ecosystems that we know
can hold lots of carbon but which are disap-
pearing rapidly: peatlands and grasslands
and forests, but also mangroves, sea grasses,
and salt marshes. In agriculture, which can
strip soils of much of the carbon they once
contained, it can mean using grazing and
tilling and cover cropping practices that
conserve carbon, or adding more carbon
with biochar, a soil amendment made with a
kind of charcoal. For forests, easy solutions
include focusing on reforestation (plant-
ing or simply allowing regrowth in places
where trees have been lost) or proforesta-
tion (a fancy term for protecting existing for-
ests that might otherwise be cut down) and
being thoughtful about afforestation (put-
ting new trees where there were no forests
previously). It can even mean managing
timberlands to store more carbon. If you
cut fewer trees from a stand or cut stands
less frequently, you can still produce wood
while keeping carbon on the landscape.
(In some cases, carefully managed thin-
ning can actually increase carbon seques-
tration, because it allows remaining trees
the chance to grow large.) In the Northwest,
Douglas fir plantations are commonly cut
every 35 to 40 years, to maximize profits.
But it’s well known, thanks in part to early
studies at Wind River, that letting trees live
to 80 or 100, while potentially less lucra-
tive, produces more wood and sequesters
more carbon.CAPTURE
Sea Change↙
Oceans make up 71 percent of Earth, and
give us food, work, and a habitable planet.
They also absorb 90 percent of the excess
heat trapped by greenhouse gases and
about 30 percent of all CO 2 released into
the atmosphere. For that they get: acidi-
fication, less oxygen, dying sea life. Three
things that could help:1.
According to Janis Searles Jones at
Ocean Conservancy, we will lose nearly
all coral reefs if temperatures rise by
2 degrees. At the Florida Aquarium in
Tampa, scientists are working to make
coral more resilient; they’ve successfully
bred the endangered pillar coral for the
first time in a lab. And the Florida Fish
and Wildlife Conservation Commission is
preserving coral specimens to preserve
biodiversity—like a seed bank for corals.2.
Warming waters are driving fish species
to relocate. So scientists at Rutgers are
developing models to see how fish stocks
will change in the future, to help fisheries
and communities adapt.3.
Committees in the House and Senate
passed the Climate-Ready Fisheries Act
of 2019 to help fishing communities. And
the House passed the COAST Research
Act to support expanded research and
monitor ocean acidification.Searles Jones says, “To bring the ocean to
the climate fight, we need you and all your
friends. Your elected officials need to hear
from you.”