🌳 CARBON CAPTURE Archives • The Impact

A Recipe For Biomass-Based Carbon Removal

Christina Zhou — Mon, 29 Nov 2021 23:15:51 +0000

In Waste to Carbon Credits 101: Biomass-Based Carbon Removal, we covered the absolute basics of biomass-based carbon removal and its potential impact.

Let’s revisit: On a high level, how does it work, and what factors influence how well it works?

Waste biomass input -> process (pyrolysis) -> CO2 removal via conversion of biomass to a stable output (biochar and bio-oil).

We can think of these different components like a recipe. Similar to how the ingredients, bake time/temperature, and food storage impact the longevity and deliciousness of your favorite cookies, the feedstock, process, and application of the final material play a role in determining the carbon removal benefits of biochar and bio-oil, and co-benefits of biochar.

Biomass:

This can mean any organic matter to be used as fuel/feedstock for a process. Many companies have turned to waste biomass as the source material for these processes. Examples include timber byproducts, agricultural waste/crop residues such as walnut shells or corn stover, or even sewage waste.

Feedstock variables to consider include:

Availability: How reliably can the feedstock be sourced?
Processing: How well it can be processed (e.g. does it need to be dried or chopped)
Location relative to processing plant: Will the feedstock need to be transported long distances for processing?
What would have happened to the biomass if it was not diverted for carbon removal/biochar production? This is critical for determining additionality.
Nutrient mix: this was found to have the biggest impact (versus pyrolysis type and temperature) on biochar properties with respect to its use as a soil amendment. Conversely, utilizing more nutrient feedstocks such as manure or sewage waste may increase the risk of toxic compounds in the biochar produced.

Process:

Pyrolysis, a process that involves heating the biomass with low or no oxygen, yields biochar, bio-oil, and syngas. Gasification is a similar process you’ll often find mentioned alongside pyrolysis – this also produces biochar but with much lower yields, and is more relevant for using biomass to produce syngas for energy production.

Variables to consider for pyrolysis include:

Type of process:

Slow pyrolysis: produces more biochar (400-600C, 20-50% biochar yield, residence time hours to days)
Fast pyrolysis: produces more bio-oil (400-600C, 5-20% biochar yield, residence time seconds)
Torrefaction: Also known as mild pyrolysis. Produces more biochar (~200-300C, 70-80% biochar yield, residence time minutes to hours).

Temperature

A whitepaper by Pacific Biochar highlights research that finds biochar produced at higher temperatures (>500C) is more durable from a carbon removal perspective. However, increased temperatures generally decrease the biochar yield relative to syngas.

Scale

Homegrown: This is how biochar production got started. If you search “how to make biochar”, you’ll find guidance on how to burn biomass in a pit in your yard, or how to build or purchase a small system.
Mobile/Smaller-scale systems: Takachar is an example of a company in this bucket. These are simplified, smaller-scale reactors that can be deployed near a biomass source and are advantageous in rural areas without much infrastructure.
Industrial Scale: Producing biochar at this scale has benefits with respect to efficiency and consistency, such as leveraging the gases produced in pyrolysis for other purposes (e.g. biomass processing). One example of a company that falls under this category is Carbo Culture.

Output of processes:

Biochar: This is solid carbon that has been produced on a small scale for thousands of years (it is thought that the use of biochar originated with the indigenous production of Terra Preta in the Brazilian Amazon). Research suggests that it can persist in soils for hundreds of years, if not thousands.
Some of biochar’s potential applications include but are not limited to:

Soil: This is the most well known application of biochar, and includes agriculture, remediation, and green infrastructure applications.
Building Materials: at this point, there are limited commercial applications of biochar in building materials, though projects do exist. Potential benefits include enhanced strength, fire resistance, and humidity control, among others.
Do nothing (e.g. bury underground): Self explanatory.

Bio-oil: Bio-oil is often treated as an intermediary to other fuel sources, as it isn’t particularly usable on its own. However, the company Charm Industrial is taking advantage of its properties for high-quality CO2 removal by storing it underground in disposal wells. Bio-oil slowly solidifies over time, which makes it attractive from a carbon removal perspective when pumped underground. At this point, there do not appear to be many other companies that specifically seek to produce bio-oil for the purpose of carbon removal.

Syngas: This is a mixture of gases typically consisting of carbon dioxide, carbon monoxide, methane, and hydrogen. Ideally, this is captured and used in the processing of biomass (e.g. drying the biomass), energy production, or at a minimum burned off to prevent emissions of these gases to the atmosphere.

In summary – the feedstock and processing of that feedstock impact the ratios and qualities of the three outputs, and how those outputs are used ultimately determine the climate impact and any additional benefits potentially involved

Next up – we’ll take a closer look at the business landscape for this space.

About The Author

Christina Zhou

GTM Operations & Enablement @ Instrumental Inc.

Christina manages Sales Enablement programs at Instrumental Inc, a cloud manufacturing optimization platform that partners with electronics brands to improve engineering efficiencies and reduce scrap/waste. Her professional background is in energy efficiency, with roles in revenue operations and sales development at Carbon Lighthouse, following an academic background in environmental engineering. Outside of the climate world, she supports the San Francisco Beacon Initiative as a member of their Associate Board, and in her spare time is an avid enthusiast of hip hop and house dance, the outdoors, and good food.

The post A Recipe For Biomass-Based Carbon Removal appeared first on The Impact.

Reforestation’s Crucial Role as a Carbon Sink

Stephanie Zulman — Mon, 04 Oct 2021 16:13:08 +0000

As a North Carolinian, I’ve grown up watching the forests and farmland around me make way for commercial and residential development. Watching my hometown grow is exciting. Still, it can be hard to balance conflicting feelings of wanting progress and profit with hating the ugly face of concrete replacing the acres of greenery that used to envelop so many familiar roads.

I’m comfortable with the fact that I too am a bit shaky on the line of hypocrisy when it comes to helping protect trees.

“It is what it is,” I whisper to myself as I defensively clutch my newest paperback book to my chest. I try to not let the guilt of my own participation in naughty practices like shunning an electronic screen for the smell, feel, and aesthetic of a printed book or silky lined page sway me from embracing the fact that promoting planting trees is still a better way to apologize to Mother Nature than a handwritten note.

This issue will explore the feel-good role of repopulating the Earth with her original terrestrial carbon storage tanks: trees. It’s essential that we start aggressively tackling reforestation projects to help Earth’s interconnected ecosystems find a new balance, and so we don’t overheat the planet to the point of no return.

Reforestation has started to garner a larger portion of the general public’s attention. Its importance in habitat and wildlife conservation, its key role in supporting rural populations, and the growing need to reforest areas ravaged by wildfires are all strong motivators. Our forest ecosystems hold approximately 45% of all carbon stored on land. Companies are beginning to get more involved in reforestation efforts as government policies, consumer awareness, and the carbon market evolves. In other words, the advantages of restoring degraded land are increasingly being recognized as critical for both the scientific and economic benefits of environmental remediation.

If you’d like a bit more background on the trees of the worlds’ ingenious design that helps regulate our planet, I’d advise starting at the foundation: Understanding the Carbon Cycle. If you’d rather hear about why we should all start protecting our forests, I’d recommend reading a summary on Conservation’s Crucial Role. Don’t worry, this article won’t make you start guilt-tripping yourself every time you reach for a paper towel. That’ll be in a few weeks, so enjoy your clear conscience for now.

Basics on the Importance of Planting Trees

For everyone’s sake, it’s good to first go over a few key points before diving into the topic of reforestation. Trees are a type of biomass, which means that they’re a renewable organic material that’s kindly provided by the Earth to eat up carbon dioxide and provide oxygen. The vast forests that span(ned) the Earth are a key element to maintaining our ecosystems’ natural rhythm taking carbon out of the atmosphere and repurposing it for some other use. Trees are the original carbon capture tool, naturally engineered to perfection. Human efforts to replicate this magic are an ongoing effort…

Ideally, we want our forests to be carbon sinks, which means that they suck up more carbon dioxide (through photosynthesis) than they give off. Nature’s ingenious design enables trees to help regulate the climate and support the health of the planet’s terrain, water, and air. Overall, the system works well and can take a bit of stress. Unfortunately, humanity’s recent pollution spree has put so many emissions into the sky that we’ve reached the point where drastic action has to be taken. Since, thanks to us, trees are both a huge source of anthropogenic emissions and a key pillar in keeping the carbon cycle in balance, it’s crucial that we both protect and restore them. However, it’s good to remember that while planting and preserving trees is vastly important, it’s no panacea to the larger problem of preventing cataclysmic climate change.

Afforestation, a term that sometimes gets lumped in with reforestation, is defined as planting trees in areas where no tree has rooted before. Often, this is done for commercial use. New forests are also planted by governments as “I’m sorry for taking all your natural habitat” gifts for displaced animals. Still, both reforestation and afforestation have important roles to play in organic carbon storage. Afforestation also acts as a replacement to using natural forests for consumer products, saving carbon and creature’s homes. Reforestation has arguably a much prettier payoff when it comes to our main concern here–carbon capture. Science shows that new rainforests grown on degraded land, known as secondary forests, can store up to 11 times more carbon than old-growth rainforests, where tree growth has generally plateaued. Unfortunately, we must remember to remind ourselves that these benefits will take as long a time to be realized as it takes for those trees to mature.

A 2019 study published by an international research team in the Journal of Science estimated that if we planted over half a trillion trees on the 900 million hectares (2.2 billion acres) of Earth’s viable land, we could capture around 205 gigatons of carbon. This would reduce atmospheric carbon levels by a quarter and negate, based on our current emissions rate, two decades’ worth of human pollution. While this would serve as a welcome speed bump, both the pros and cons of this measure are best described by the Chinese proverb I’ve seen quoted often during my research: “The best time to start planting trees was twenty years ago. The second-best time is now.”

Classifying Reforestation: Tree Plantations, Newly Planted Forests, & Naturally Regenerating Forests

Reforestation efforts fall into two main categories: natural regeneration and artificial regeneration. Natural regeneration, the least complex of the two, is the birth of new seedlings and sprouts directly from the original source. As the name indicates, this doesn’t require direct human intervention and enables new tree growth with the use of native species that are inherently compatible with the region and its soil.

That being said, natural regeneration can also serve as a much more cost-effective way for rural property owners to use biomass, compared with creating a whole new artificial plantation for harvesting. Their task is as easy as lighting some candles, sprinkling rose petals in an alluring trail, and putting on some smooth R&B to create the right conditions for reproduction. Artificial regeneration is similarly pretty self-explanatory. Human hands choose, plant, and monitor the growth of new trees from seed to sapling to full maturity. With so many factors to control, this approach is much more complex and entails a greater level of planning and cost.

Currently

The Global Forest Resources Assessment, conducted in 2020, provides good insight into the present state of reforestation efforts and the growing need for more ambitious initiatives. Currently, 93% of Earth’s forests are naturally regenerated. The remaining 7% of forest growth, encompassing 290 million hectares, is replanted trees. This significantly smaller category has two main subsets: tree plantations (3%) and newly planted forests (4%).

Tree plantations serve a similar purpose to a sugarcane or banana plantation– they’re sowed in order to produce feedstocks fed into various supply chains. These intensively managed plantation forests generate both wood and non-wood forest products (NWFP) that are traded internationally as lumber, pulp, paper, biomass fuels, gums, resins, and latexes. NWFPs are essentially all other plant and animal products found in and around trees: tannins, foliage and fruits, extracts and oils, fibers and medicinal plants, gums, and resins. South America has the highest share of plantation forests, while Europe has the lowest.

Plantations, while not the solution to increasing our carbon sink, are a major source of subsistence for millions of rural and poor peoples and are firmly entrenched in our international markets. Construction, energy, and manufacturing rely heavily on materials harvested on plantations. Many of these substances, like resins and gums, are so essential and their applications so broad that they could fill full articles by themselves. For those interested in diving deeper into the production, trade, and consumption of forest products, the Food & Agriculture Organization of the UN (FAO) provides a wealth of data and analysis.

Newly planted forests come with their own benefits and challenges, as planting trees comes with its own nuances. The type and number of different tree species chosen, climate/geographic location, land characteristics, timing, and intentions of the planter are all significant. Some trees are like cats; if you periodically feed and maintain their environment they’ll be good to go. Many are like a doodle puppy; they need to be constantly watered and told how special they are if you want them to thrive. Imagine the amount of time, energy, and money you’d need to sink into a forest of doodles.

Also like a poorly trained, unsocialized dog, a badly planned reforestation effort can end up having counterintuitive effects. The consequences of neglect can be trees releasing more carbon dioxide and negatively impacting local biodiversity. Projects can wither and die as time and costs inflate. It shouldn’t be underestimated how much thought and effort is needed to go into successfully cultivating new forests. I’ll be singing accolades about one company in particular that’s tackling this challenge extremely intelligently in the next piece (Terraformation), where we’ll explore businesses currently in the tree planting game.

Global Reforestation Efforts & Impacts

So, what else is being done around the world to address this issue? We’ve all heard about the Paris Climate Agreement that not one of the world’s largest economies is on track to actually achieve. There are the EU’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) that have started making their way onto business websites as sustainability becomes a hotter topic.

Currently, 61 countries have united under the Bonn Challenge, launched in 2011, to restore 350 million hectares of degraded land by 2030. The good news is that their first goal of restoring 150 million hectares by 2020 was successfully surpassed. The most recent USA-specific data available from the Bonn Challenge’s barometer shows that from 2010 to 2018, the US invested ten billion dollars, created 55,000 jobs, and sequestered 5.2 million tons of CO₂. This was done through the restoration of 16,959,000 hectares (41.9 million acres) of land. That amounts to the addition of approximately 21.2 billion trees in the US alone. While this positive metric shows that we are actively making progress in reforestation efforts, it still isn’t enough… In 2018 the US alone emitted 4.98 million kilotons (multiply a ton by 1,000) of carbon dioxide. Artificial reforestation requires both the huge time and capital investments needed to make reforestation happen and the positive economic benefits countries can enjoy.

Changing environments have massive, long-term repercussions. Climate change is already increasing the number of internal and external refugees countries must manage and protect. Historically, the reasons why people flee have never changed; people leave their homes when there’s no food, safety, or opportunity.

The Sahel, a destitute, degraded region located on the southern edge of the Sahara desert, has been battling droughts, famine, and falling crop yields from increasingly degraded soil for decades. These problems have been catalyzed by both the rural area’s high population growth rate and significant temperature changes from climate change—Africa’s Great Green Wall will serve as an important case study of the efficacy of a massive forestation initiative to provide a barrier against climate change.

The Great Green Wall was started a decade ago in Africa’s semiarid Sahel region as both a proactive and reactive measure to combat poverty, climate change, and mass migration. Ultimately, the vision is for this colossal restoration effort to stretch from Senegal to Djibouti. The initiative, currently about 15% underway, pushes to combat desertification and restore native plant life by cultivating a horizontal line of trees that will span the entire width of the continent. Running through 11 countries, (Burkina Faso, Chad, Djibouti, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Mali, Mauritania, Nigeria, Niger, Sudan, & Senegal), the hope is that the restoration of 100 million hectares of land across Africa will sequester 250 million tons of carbon and create 10 million jobs by 2030.

With the help of nonprofits, local communities, individuals, investors, and philanthropists to bring this restoration effort to its fruition, the Great Green Wall will be the largest natural structure on Earth. On the official website, it states that they intend to launch an online platform by the end of this year to help connect anyone who wants to get involved and coordinate bankable projects.

However, everything needs to make financial sense and reforestation efforts are no exception. In the next edition, we’ll dig deeper into various forms of bankable reforestation efforts.

About The Author

Stephanie Zulman

Partner • Editor-in-Chief @ The Impact

Stephanie holds a BBA in Supply & Value Chain Management and in Entrepreneurship & Innovation from TCU (Go Frogs!!) and minored in both Energy and History because… why not. After a stint in LA working in lean manufacturing for a large industrial company, her most recent educational foray was as a part of the LEAP program at Boston University to explore the field of Material Science & Engineering. Stephanie’s most recent work has been volunteering with a small DAC startup in Reykjavik called Carbon Iceland. Now, she’s living the dream working in supply chain as a Procurement Analyst at the carbon capture company, LanzaTech. An aspiring tree hugger, she hopes to spend the rest of her career aiding the massive societal transition to cleaner industrial and business practices– ideally through work pertaining to carbon capture, sequestration, and the processes’ byproduct utilization to unite her love of science, sustainability, business, and supply chain. In her free time she enjoys both the American and English versions of football, growing her working knowledge of plant cultivation, and reading.

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Conservation’s Crucial Role as a Carbon Sink

Stephanie Zulman — Mon, 13 Sep 2021 17:52:00 +0000

Welcome back, my newly minted tree connoisseurs. In my quest to answer a commonly asked question of why we can’t just plant trees to capture all the harmful carbon dioxide clogging up the atmosphere, the first issue in this series focused on explaining what the carbon cycle is, why it’s essential, and all of the glorious ways humanity has overloaded Earth’s natural systems to the point that we might end up fully breaking the scale. This article builds upon this knowledge by exploring conservation’s importance to protecting trees’ role as a carbon sink.

Many of us have heard the philosophical teaser: If a tree falls in the middle of a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?

I am here to inform you that this question is meaningless. The more pressing concern should be the fact that that tree, loud or not, has now had its years of quiet, dedicated work storing carbon eviscerated. At that point, I feel like that tree deserves the emotional release of a good, full-bellied roar. It’s as if, after 142 years of building the Duomo in Florence, Italy, some random schmuck decided to Rambo the whole place to ashes.

Circling back to the plight of the commonly slain tree and the displaced carbon, birds, plants, insects, and animals that once made it their home, the damage may seem negligible when we focus on just one tree. However, one must take stock of forests’ large-scale impact as carbon sinks and guardians to biodiversity. Then, add into our analysis the current trends in global conservation efforts, and we can start to get a clearer picture of how much active tree storage we have left to work with and why it should be defended.

How Much Carbon Trees Capture

According to a 2021 study in Nature Climate Change, Earth’s forests absorb 16 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide every year. When you subtract the impact of gross emissions from deforestation and degradation, their positive impact is halved to a net 7.6 billion tons.

One way to appreciate trees’ value is by understanding how much carbon a single tree can capture. This depends on its age, climate, forest, and soil type. For the most part, it takes a decade of maturation for tree species to begin storing carbon and become active participants in the carbon cycle. At that point, the amount of carbon dioxide a tree can absorb and store as carbon will grow each year with the tree. If an oak sapling was planted in 2011, it would only begin to have the capacity to store carbon this year and just 0.10 pounds worth at that. Only at 23 years old does it even reach a full 1 pound per year absorption rate. So, by 2050, that one oak tree will have stored a total of 17.95 pounds of carbon within itself, assuming it hasn’t been burned or chopped down for timber. Based on Statista’s data of carbon dioxide emissions per person in the US, the average American would have emitted approximately 547.78 metric tons in that time frame.

If we zoom out, a protected forest of lively, 50-year-old oaks can sequester 30,000 pounds of carbon per acre. So, while trees do store a lot of carbon, unfortunately, instant gratification was simply not included in their design. It takes time. Conserving a forest simply has a much greater positive impact than planting a forest.

The Importance of Tree Conservation

There’s a reason why the Amazon rainforest has been nicknamed “the lungs of the earth,” and it’s based more on science than romanticism. Like many other parts of the natural world, the Amazon was designed to absorb CO2 and act as a mighty yet humble carbon sink. It truly can’t be overstated how important it is for us to protect these lungs.

Conservation is the simplest variable to understand. Maintaining the carbon sinks we still have is crucial to species/biodiversity preservation and creating barriers to deforestation. There are many practical drivers for banning deforestation. Tree root systems help moderate flooding and prevent erosion because, unlike concrete, they strengthen the soil around them, allowing them to better absorb and redistribute high volumes of water, and withstand wind.

Biodiversity preservation is key to sustaining natural ecosystems that are critical to saving all life. We regularly take advantage of it to make critical scientific breakthroughs that directly affect modern medicine. Of the 3,000 plants the US National Cancer Institute has classified as having potential anti-cancer properties, 70% are endemic to the Amazon Rainforest. From aspirin to malaria cures, the medicinal benefits we receive from biodiversity can’t be stressed enough. Forests also serve as irreplaceable attractions that sustain many country’s tourism industries. Here in the US, we tangibly benefit from conservation efforts through the 423 bountiful national park sites that encompass 84 million acres of land.

However, these existing natural reserves can’t sustain biodiversity by themselves. Even with conservation efforts, those protected trees are just as vulnerable to the damaging effects of climate change, and overall, protected areas only represent a tiny portion of existing forest biodiversity.

How to Measure Positive Impact

Some ways of comparing specific countries’ positive impacts on conservation are more effective than others. According to the World Resources Institute, the realms currently protecting the highest percentage of their forests are quite often the smaller countries of the world and/or are the countries that have much smaller areas of forest left. These top five percentage-wise countries are, in order, Cambodia, Poland, Bulgaria, Germany, and Slovakia.

On the other hand, the countries with the greatest quantities of protected forest area are those who naturally possess the largest amounts of forest. This metric is clearly the most important of the two when considering the total amounts of carbon dioxide being filtered out of the air by trees. The top five countries for the largest quantities of forest area protected are Brazil, Russia, Canada, the US, and Venezuela. Anyone relatively familiar with global news won’t need much explanation as to why this data is somewhat (wildly) ironic. However, we’ll get into this more in the fourth piece of this series on deforestation.

How Do We Protect Our Trees?

The easiest way to conserve trees is through legal protection, making government intervention key to protecting forests. This effort is monitored through the World Database on Protected Areas (WDPA), which was created by the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP). Around one-fifth of the worlds’ forest area has some sort of legal protection carved into it with invisible lines. However, this doesn’t fully ensure that these areas are actively being protected.

On the ground, conservation takes many other interesting and fancy names. Improved Forest Management (IFM) involves delaying/avoiding harvesting timber and, overall, looking to improve the efficiency and productivity of forests. Nonprofits, such as Nature Conservancy, buy up vulnerable land so that loggers, commercial real estate, and other ambitious land clearing businesses cannot.

The preservation agenda has begun to morph into a profitable opportunity for businesses looking to offset their emissions. Offset credits (each of which equals one metric ton of carbon) have started to become a desirable currency for companies looking to show investors that they can achieve the in-vogue label of “carbon neutrality” and contribute to voluntary reduction goals. With bulging ESG funds and a need to negate without compromising on the emissions that they’ve labeled as unavoidable, investing in conservation is a relatively simple and effective way to earn offset credits and become a participant in our growing cap-and-trade systems.

This evolving market will continue to grow with legislation, active business participation, and the growing shift in consumer’s attention to the terror of a world on fire. Just as exciting are the new value chains growing from this fusion of our market values with climate activism/survivalism. The Nature Conservancy, the world’s largest environmental group, is already an instrumental key for many corporate giants to invest in carbon sinks. It enrolls landowners and utilizes its own preserved forests to create carbon offset projects for companies like JP Morgan and Disney to purchase credits from.

Small governments can find profit in these initiatives as well. BlackRock Inc. has directly paid the city of Albany, New York to preserve the forests around its reservoirs so that they wouldn’t be cut down. Walt Disney Co. has engaged in similar tree transactions to protect a forest surrounding a reservoir in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. In general, Disney provides an excellent example of the complexities and issues that can arise from aggressive corporate conservation investments.

However, it should be noted that the carbon offset market is more like a sparkly Band-Aid than Neosporin. Paying a company to hold off on chopping down lumber doesn’t mean that the forest isn’t going to get cut down… just that they’re getting money to hold off for a bit. Unfortunately, mechanisms like cap and trade allow large companies to put off making meaningful, operational changes. While any significant investment that reduces our net emissions should be encouraged, it doesn’t, for example, discourage BP from drilling for oil like a rabid, juiced-up mole.

Outlook

In case you missed the news, which would be entirely fair given the current state of global affairs, 2021 was the start of the UN’s Decade on Ecosystem Restoration. The aim of this glamorous banner is to unite the world to protect and resuscitate Earth’s plethora of suffering ecosystems. Always timely, it’s expected to last until the 2030 Sustainable Development Goals deadline. Whether this measure will be wholly or marginally successful will depend on the (in)actions of the powerhouse countries who have the greatest ability to control the outcome– given their GDP, global influence, and willingness to conserve and restore their abundant natural resources.

Conservation, as we’ve seen, is vastly important. It takes much more time to break, remake, and then wait for the gains to hopefully reappear. Governments and businesses alike must adjust their definition of value so that the long-term benefits of our environmental impact weigh more heavily than the short-term cost of investment and a quick turnaround to profitability. Aggressively and heavily investing in protection, remediation, and mitigation initiatives will require the emotional maturity to accept that, much like a tree’s slow timeline to grow its carbon storage capacity, many of their benefits will not be ready to show off in next year’s investor’s meeting.

In the next part of this series of carbon capture via trees, we’ll look at the second key element to maintaining our trees’ role as a carbon sink: reforestation.

About The Author

Stephanie Zulman

Partner • Editor-in-Chief @ The Impact

The post Conservation’s Crucial Role as a Carbon Sink appeared first on The Impact.

Everyone Should Understand The Carbon Cycle

Stephanie Zulman — Mon, 06 Sep 2021 23:28:22 +0000

Earth’s burning. Literally. And finally, we are beginning to see large swaths of our population turn their heads towards the threat of increasingly obnoxious global warming and begin to ask what they can do to help. The best way that I think I can add value is by helping address one of climate change’s most time-sensitive variables: the atmospheric oversaturation of carbon dioxide. When I brightly proclaim my aspirations to have a career in this less popular Earth-saving field called carbon capture, I’m most often met with blank stares and uncomfortable chuckles as if I’ve suddenly started speaking in tongues. So, I’ll usually give a quick explainer: “our skies are already oversaturated with carbon dioxide and other harmful particulates, and it’s crucial to suck as much of it out as we can ASAP to survive climate change.“

What has really fascinated me is that the second reaction I’m met with most often is: “Well, what about the trees? Can’t we just plant more trees?”

I usually struggle at this point with how to articulate a neat description of the practical and scientific reasons why a mass effort to plant trees will not simply solve this issue, or whether I should just scream “NO” and find the nearest bag to hyperventilate into. The global warming puzzle we now must solve is complex. Many of its pieces are wrought out of fires that we have forged ourselves. Others are linked to the very fabric of the natural world and its codependent ecosystems.

Carbon capture, an essential tool that’s finally starting to receive the attention it deserves as a necessity to combat climate change, is still a field that much of the population does not understand. Even without the heavy touch of humanity-induced climate change, capturing carbon atoms is still a pivotal component of Earth’s interconnected carbon cycle. It works well independently and can put up with a moderate number of unasked contributions. Understanding how Earth did it before we came around messing up the balance and needing more aggressive means to control our pollution propensity is the first step to appreciate why we should really all become some type of tree hugger.

The Earth & Atmosphere's Operational Relationship with Carbon

The Science Behind the Cycle

To appreciate the impact of trees, one has to first understand what their role is in the big picture of Earth’s normal operations. So, let’s talk about the carbon cycle. On the most basic level, photosynthesis (CO2 absorption) and respiration (CO2 release) are the two fundamental processes involved in exchanging carbon atoms between Earth’s atmosphere and its terrestrial biosphere (aka land-based vegetation). Through the process of photosynthesis, plants emit oxygen and store carbon to become what we call a carbon sink. Respiration provides what’s known as a carbon source. The oldest, expected emitters are animals and slain/decaying plants. However, older and larger concentrations of carbon, previously undisturbed until human intervention, have become a more venerable carbon source. Our impact has been so significant that we’ve even given our pollution contribution from human activities its own name: anthropogenic carbon emissions. In the past 80,000 years, the planet hasn’t seen anywhere near as high a concentration of particles in the atmosphere as there are right now.

The Scourge of Anthropogenic Emissions

The carbon cycle does the best that it can to balance the massive excess of carbon atoms we’ve been emitting. The terrestrial biosphere absorbs approximately one-fourth of anthropogenic CO2 emissions annually. The ocean absorbs another fourth, and the remaining half of our emissions remain in the atmosphere. While there are many other polluting particulates, CO2 is a favorite to focus on because it accounts for the highest percentage of emissions at about 80% and has been proven to be the key gas that sets the Earth’s temperature. It stays in the atmosphere for the longest period of time(scientists estimate this lifespan to be between 300 and 1,000 years), and hotboxes the Earth by trapping heat that would otherwise escape and re-emitting it back down to us.

A resounding theme we can see in nature from a macro to subatomic particle level is an innate propensity for homeostasis. Without our help or knowledge, our planet has already figured out many clever mechanisms that it deploys to create its own checks and balances system. When temperatures rise, the rate of photosynthesis and respiration naturally increase. However, at the aptly named climate tipping point, this balance is predicted to cease. At this point of atmospheric oversaturation, although the rate of respiration will continue to function normally, photosynthesis will begin to decline. So, as the scales become imbalanced, we’ll find that we all have much less oxygen to go around.

Outlook

Measuring carbon levels is important because it is our planet’s natural thermometer. Earth’s atmosphere regulates temperature and will respond to extreme imbalances much like how the human body does once it reaches an internal temperature of around 104°F (40°C): the major organs that give us life will begin to break down. At 107°F (41.67°C), the body’s most likely not going to bounce back. Scientists have determined that after the Earth’s temperature rises past 2°C (which is expected to happen by the end of this century), the planet will experience a similar phenomenon. We’re currently predicted to hit the 1.5°C marker by 2030, so expect even bigger, more dramatic changes on the murky, clogged horizon.

The doomsday level temperature increase is equivalent to a rise in the atmospheric concentration of CO2 of between 425-450 parts per million (ppm). Before humanity went all-in for fossil fuels, preindustrial levels of carbon dioxide were 280 ppm. According to NASA’s James Hansen, a top climate scientist, the “safe” upper limit was really 350 ppm. Earth, by herself, needed 20,000 years to go from 185 ppm to that preindustrial 280 level measured in 1850. According to Hansen’s op-ed, at 550 ppm, we’d reach catastrophic temperatures previously last seen when sea levels were 80 feet higher. So, we all have that to look forward to, too.

According to CarbonTracker, the global monthly mean of anthropogenic emissions sitting in the atmosphere was 416.49 ppm as of May of this year. Overall, the data shows an easy to interpret summary: the concentration of particulates in our atmosphere is consistently still on the rise every single year.

With this newfound appreciation of the carbon cycle’s importance in keeping our planet cool, we can see how and why our pollution propensity is pulling us towards catastrophic climate change. There is an urgent need to start pulling as much carbon out of the atmosphere as possible. Now begins our tree-hugging trekk to appreciate why we must both plant and protect trees, and deem the strength of their role as a carbon sink. For the sake of simplicity, this series will only examine the tree-related variables helping and hindering our progress to dial back Earth’s rising fever.

About The Author

Stephanie Zulman

Partner • Editor-in-Chief @ The Impact

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