Carbon targets: Following a similar announcement by China, India said it would cut its carbon intensity the amount of carbon dioxide emitted relative to economic output by 20-25%from 2005 levels by 2020.
Environment minister Jairam Ramesh, announcing the commitment on 3 december, said that the target was worked out in concert with other developing countries (see Nature 462,550;
Australia's government has for the second time rejected proposed legislation to create a carbon-trading scheme.
Carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases are dangerous to human health, the US Environmental protection agency declared on 7 december.
Market watch Amazonian nations will be the early winners in any market for forest carbon credits,
The Forest Carbon Index, released by the environmental think tank Resources for the Future and consultancy firm Climate Advisers, both based in WASHINGTON DC, charts where governments should invest in preserving forests in developing countries.
The report says that 85%of the best places for early forest carbon returns (2013-20) are in the greater Amazon
Australia's national science agency has been accused of trying to alter a peer-reviewed paper that was critical of carbon-trading schemes,
At the Very Large Telescope in Chile, Bean placed a gas cell filled with ammonia in the path of the starlight,
Amazon is best site for forest carbon investments: Nature Newsamazon nations will be the early winners in a future market for forest carbon credits,
which could grow to US$20 billion annually by 2020, according to a new report. It is estimated that deforestation accounts for around 12%of the greenhouse-gas emissions that cause climate change1
and there is general agreement that the next global climate deal-under negotiation next week in Copenhagen-should include a forest protection plan.
The Forest Carbon Index, released by the environmental think tank Resources for the Future and consultancy firm Climate Advisers, both based in WASHINGTON DC, aims to help investors
The index is calculated based on an area's biological potential to store carbon and the local opportunity costs of protecting forests rather than cutting them down for timber,
It's the first study of its kind to display the best places to enter the forest carbon market in such a comprehensive way,
According to the study, the Amazon-Andes, Central america, the Congo Basin, Madagascar and Southeast asia are all experiencing enough deforestation to capitalize on the carbon market.
The report suggests that 85%of the best places for forest carbon returns are in the greater Amazon
The Congo Basin with its carbon-rich forests and rock-bottom prices contains around 75%of the potentially high-profit locations.
But relatively low deforestation rates, political instability and lack of capacity to bring carbon credits to market mean that the region is unlikely to garner much investment in the next decade.
because it wants developed nations to concentrate on reducing their own carbon emissions (although this position may soften in the Copenhagen talks,
'says that although the index is a good overview of forest carbon opportunities, some of the global and national datasets used should be treated with caution.
Areas that are identified currently in the Congo Basin as low cost forest carbon may actually lie over valuable mineral concessions
head of forest services at carbon-trading company Ecosecurities, based in Dublin, Ireland. Fehse would like the index to be expanded to track progress in developing policy,
legal and social systems for the carbon market in the years to come. As layers of information are added,
The explosion generated several Suns'worth of radioactive nickel-56 and vast quantities of other lighter elements, such as carbon and silicon.
These new particles don't exert the same outward pressure on the star as their photon parents,
The method can be tailored to produce a host of high-value chemicals, including molecules that mimic standard petrol,
and could be expanded to work on tougher cellulosic materials, the researchers say. The work identifies a potentially cost-effective way of converting grass
LS9 says that the shift from sugars to biomass as a feedstock would reduce greenhouse gases even further.
The company has been working to convert sugars into tailored molecules for several years, says co-author Stephen del Cardayre, LS9's vice-president for research and development.
and then short-circuited E coli's internal machinery for producing large fatty-acid molecules, enabling them to convert precursor molecules directly into fuels and other chemicals.
The team then inserted genes from other bacteria to produce enzymes able to break down hemicellulose.
And on Thursday, Lisa Murkowski (Republican, Alaska) introduced a resolution that would effectively block the Environmental protection agency (EPA) from implementing new greenhouse-gas regulations.
The language states that Congress disapproves of the EPA's December 2009 assessment that greenhouse gases pose a threat to public health.
By declaring greenhouse gases a public health threat, the EPA is now legally bound to regulate emissions.
Many large corporations see greenhouse gas regulations as inevitable and are now arguing for legislation on the grounds that they cannot make investments
or a scaled-back climate bill that focuses on power plants and possibly on other major industrial sources of greenhouse-gas emissions.
when it began regulating greenhouse gases, and it might not be a bad option for the United states,
particularly if coupled with separate greenhouse-gas regulations that the administration is developing for automobiles,
such as the climate or a particular environmental chemical, that affects one or more pigmentation genes, says Fang.
says Mike Bruford, a molecular ecologist at Cardiff University, UK, who worked on that study2. The giant panda genome,
Carbon credits proposed for whale conservation: Nature Newsbiological oceanographer Andrew Pershing wants carbon credits for whale conservation.
That's because whales, he says, are like trees. Like any animal or plant, they are made out of carbon.
And whales are so big they each store a lot of carbon, he says. Pershing, of the University of Maine in Orono and the Gulf of Maine Research Institute in Portland, Maine, calculates that
even though some whale species are now recovering from the effects of factory whaling, total whale biomass today is less than one-fifth of
Oregon, could eventually sequester 9 million tonnes of carbon in their combined biomass. He compares it to planting trees.
Whales take carbon out of the system through their food, then incorporate that carbon in their tissues.
Whaling, by contrast, is like cutting down trees for firewood. You're taking whales out of the population
and putting their carbon somewhere else. In the early days of whaling Pershing explains, that carbon was going straight into the atmosphere through the burning of whale oil in lamps, for example.
More recently, he says, the carbon is released through the consumption of whale meat by humans,
but you're still taking carbon out of the whale and putting it into something that's going to respire it.
Furthermore, when whales die naturally, they usually sink to the bottom of the ocean, carrying their carbon with them.
Back in 1900, when whale numbers were high, that would have totalled about 200,000 tonnes of carbon per year,
Pershing estimates. Even though benthic creatures eventually eat the whale carcasses (see'Bone-devouring worms discovered),
'the carbon will remain in the depths, Pershing says, staying out of the atmosphere for potentially hundreds of years.
By comparison, 9 million tonnes is only a small fraction of the 7 billion tonnes of carbon entering the atmosphere each year from human activities,
It's also comparable to the amount of carbon involved in forest-management schemes being proposed for buying
and selling carbon credits, he said. People would pay a lot to preserve an area of forest that big.
Pershing's research may actually understate the degree to which whales could sequester carbon. The iron in whale faeces is an important micronutrient that is often in short supply in waters such as the Southern Ocean,
the indirect benefits of iron fertilization from whale faeces might remove more carbon from the atmosphere by boosting algal growth than the growth of the whales themselves.
And even though all of these animals'biomass combined represents a small fraction of total human carbon emissions,
they could still sequester many tonnes of carbon. You could use carbon as one of the incentives to rebuild the stores of these large organisms
Pershing says.
News briefing: 25 february 2010: Nature Newspolicy Business Research Events People Business watch The week ahead Number crunch Sound bites Policy Stem-cell lines:
Chandrayaan-1 and Chang'e-1. go. nature. com/QIBPPZ 3-5 march The International Emissions Trading Association joins with various United nations agencies to host the second Africa Carbon Forum
In 2007, agriculture was responsible for 43.7%of the total 30.3 million tonnes of chemical oxygen demand (COD) a measure of organic pollutants in water.
as has the nation's use of chemical fertilizers. In 2007 China consumed 32.6 million tonnes of nitrogen fertilizer, a 191%increase over 1981.
and was developed by Mahyco-Monsanto Biotech, a joint venture between the Jalna-based Maharashtra Hybrid Seed Company and the US seed giant Monsanto,
and food in the hands of our farmers and consumers instead of a few multinational corporations like Monsanto, says Gangula Ramanjaneyulu, director of the Centre for Sustainable agriculture in Hyderabad.
such as rice that is insect-resistant (Bt rice) or enriched with Vitamin a and micronutrients. Our national labs have all the genes for rice improvement,
we do need not Monsanto, says Govindarajan Padmanabhan, a biochemist and former director of the Indian Institute of Science in Bangalore.
German chemicals company BASF has received its first approval to market genetically modified seeds. Its herbicide-tolerant soya bean'Cultivance,
BASF is hoping to break into a market dominated by Monsanto, Syngenta, Dupont and Bayer; its'Amflora'genetically modified starchy potato is awaiting European union approval.
greenhouse-gas emissions by 20, %formally qualifying it as a'renewable fuel'for a federal mandate that requires the use of 136 billion litres of biofuels in 2022.
Nature Newsthe burning of fossil fuels such as coal and oil releases carbon dioxide that alters the balance of carbon isotopes naturally found in the environment an effect that is now being found in food,
Modern methods for tracking the origins of processed foods use isotopes atoms of the same element that have different numbers of neutrons.
Of the most common naturally occurring isotopes of carbon carbon-12, with six neutrons, and carbon-13, with seven the heavier carbon-13 isotope is rarer.
In many plants, 108 out of 10,000 carbon atoms are carbon-13. However in plants such as sugar cane and maize (corn),
which use a different type of photosynthesis, 110 out of 10,000 atoms are carbon-13.
Tracking these ratios is a key part of how food regulatory bodies determine if low-cost sweeteners,
Because sweeteners from sugar cane and maize have a higher proportion of carbon-13, the carbon isotope ratio of the final product will be skewed.
As part of an undergraduate project intended to show how isotope analysis works, geochemist William Peck at Colgate university in Hamilton,
New york, got his students to analyse maple syrup from different parts of the northeastern United states. Our intent was really just to see
if isotope values varied by geography or if anyone was putting in sweeteners, says Peck.
All of the isotope values that the class collected were much the same, but when the group compared their values to isotope values of maple syrup in papers from the late 1970s and early 1980s,
they noted that there were significant differences. Their analysis revealed that the relative amount of carbon-13 in maple syrup seemed to have gone down since the 1970s.
This got Peck wondering if it was possible that baseline isotope ratios might be shifting because of environmental changes.
To work this out Peck and his student co-author, Stephanie Tubman, obtained maple syrup samples from producers in the states of New york
if the mould might change the isotope ratio of the syrup, recalls Peck. Fortunately, it did not.
and Food Chemistry1 that maple syrup isotope ratios have shifted over the years. Samples of 1970s syrup had 108.7 carbon-13 isotopes per 10,000 carbon atoms
whereas the 2006 average was 108.5 carbon-13 isotopes per 10,000 carbon atoms. So syrup carbon-13 values are approaching the average 108 value that maple trees
and most plants should have, explains Peck. The reason, he suggests, is released that carbon from the burning of oil or coal,
which has very little carbon-13 compared to that found naturally in the atmosphere, is shifting environmental carbon isotope ratios accordingly.
Atmospheric data show that isotope ratio changes correlate directly with the changes in the maple syrup isotopes over the course of the 36 years studied
Peck says. We've known that atmospheric carbon isotope values were changing, but nobody was applying this to food science,
says geochemist John Valley at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Clearly, food-monitoring studies need to start taking atmospheric isotope data into account.
The findings raise the possibility that producers of foods that are monitored for carbon isotope ratios might be able to add cheap sweeteners without being caught.
Yet Peck doubts this is the case. The producers that could cheat have not had the necessary information do so effectively,
he says. And the findings apply to more than just food. Isotope analysis of human tissue is being considered in some countries to help determine where immigrants have come from.
I think this maple syrup study demonstrates the danger of tissue testing. If we are making serious decisions about peoples'lives with isotope analysis,
we must remember that there are numerous effects that determine the final values, says Valley. As for whether isotope ratios change the taste of maple syrup, for the moment, that remains a mystery.
We had a pancake party in class at the end to celebrate the findings, says Peck. Nobody was brave enough to try syrups from the 1970s.
Future funding for agricultural research uncertain: Nature Newsfinancial donors to a global network of 15 agricultural research centres want changes to the way the influential group plans to reshape its research programme.
In another, climate policies result in a world full of forest plantations that are created solely to store the greatest possible amount of carbon, with no regard for preserving biodiversity.
Or what if the very possibility of using geoengineering to mitigate climate change gives political leaders cover to say that greenhouse gases aren't a problem?
The term geoengineering covers everything from mundane methods for increasing carbon storage in plants soils
Keith is developing a method to use aircraft to release fine sulphur particles that will stay aloft for years in the stratosphere.
in that the microflora and yeast living on the truffles played a vital role in releasing volatile compounds,
and four times larger than that of many fungi but it contains far fewer protein-coding genes.
Despite the recent Court of Appeal ruling in Agresearch's favour, Barry Scott, head of the Institute of Molecular Biosciences at Massey University in Palmerston North, New zealand,
and GTC Biotherapeutics in Framingham, Massachusetts, who produced ATRYN, the first FDA-approved biopharmaceutical (a human anticoagulant protein) from a transgenic animal.
Nature Newscreating and strengthening protected areas and indigenous lands is one of the most effective ways of reducing greenhouse gas emissions from deforestation, according to a new paper.
that focuses on forest policy, warns that funnelling support into existing protected areas through REDD may be tricky because of the ongoing debates about what constitutes a carbon saving.
but rather the amount of forest carbon they prevent from being deforested and released to the atmosphere a concept called additionality.
says Mark Stitt at the Max Planck Institute of Molecular Plant Physiology in Potsdam, Germany.
however, is unlikely to be funded, according to Parag Chitnis, deputy director of the NSF's Division of Molecular and Cellular Biosciences.
Nature Newsthe European commission last week approved Amflora a genetically modified (GM) potato developed by German chemical company BASF.
Monsanto's MON 810 maize (corn), which is engineered to be resistant to the European corn-borer caterpillar,
and a Monsanto strain that is resistant to glyphosate-based herbicides such as'Roundup'.'And what about states that refuse to comply?
BASF has said that it only intends to grow the potatoes in countries that want it the company will begin planting Amflora this year on a few dozen hectares in Germany, Sweden and the Czech republic.
Nature Newsoxygen isotopes in clamshells may provide the most detailed record yet of global climate change,
says William Patterson, an isotope chemist at the University of Saskatchewan in Saskatoon, Canada, and lead author of the study1.
and the levels of different oxygen isotopes in their shells vary with the temperature of the water in
The colder the water, the higher the proportion of the heavy oxygen isotope oxygen-18.
isotope ratios in each of these shells provided a two-to-nine-year window onto the environmental conditions in
which measured the isotopes in each layer. From those, the scientists could calculate the conditions under which each layer formed.
The two probable dust particles found so far could mark the beginning of an analysis of
and also offer a way of charting the chemical evolution of the Milky way. The interstellar dust is fundamentally the stuff we're made of,
The grains were far harder to catch than the comet particles. Not only was the flux much lower,
but the interstellar particles were smaller than the comet grains and were moving several times faster up to 30 kilometres per second.
who adds that the researchers must conduct more tests to ensure that their particles are truly interstellar grains,
rather than micrometeorites or even pieces of the spacecraft knocked loose by debris. It took four years of searching to identify the two potential interstellar dust particles,
The researchers carefully extracted the first particle and sent it to three microprobe facilities around the world for analysis. The results offered hints of a glassy,
The new approach, published today in PLOS Neglected Tropical Diseases1, uses crystal proteins from the soil bacterium Bacillus thuringiensis (Bt.
since 1996 so crops such as corn and potato can produce the crystal proteins, protecting themselves from insects without any pesticides.
this natural protein is at least three times better, Aroian says. The parasitic worm Heligmosomoides bakeri naturally infects mice
and become reproductively active adults before treating the mice with the crystal protein. A few days after treatment, the mice had 98%fewer parasite eggs in their faecal samples
the two in vivo studies have shown significant therapeutic activity of a crystal protein against two species of nematode,
such as making sure more of the protein reaches the intestine without being dissolved in the stomach first.
The US Department of the interior has requested a scientific review of the possible ecological impact of drilling for oil and gas in the Beaufort and Chukchi seas in the Arctic.
the firm has engineered strains of yeast to produce hydrocarbon fuels and other chemicals from sugarcane feedstocks.
Chemical safety: US chemical regulation looks set for an overhaul with the introduction of the draft Safe Chemicals Act.
If passed, the new legislation will require health -and-safety information to be provided for all chemicals,
and will pass the burden of proof of safety to the manufacturers rather than the regulators, in a similar way to the European union's REACH legislation.
biochemistry and pharmacology. go. nature. com/Errfze 27-29 april The Cambridge Healthtech Institute's Drug Discovery Chemistry conference is held in San diego, California,
with programmes on antibacterial drug development and protein-protein interactions as drug targets. www. drugdiscoverychemistry. com 28-29 april A symposium hosted by the Zoological Society of London examines the link between the conservation of biodiversity
and reductions in poverty. go. nature. com/jr2rlc Number crunch 4%The proportion of global anthropogenic greenhouse-gas emissions emitted by dairy cows,
which can lead to concentration of these chemicals in the environment and negative effects. The results are mixed that's why it is important not to speak of GMOS in general
US President Barack Obama announced plans on 31 march to expand offshore oil and gas drilling,
and announced that greenhouse-gas permits would be required for major industrial sources by January. Marine protection:
Carbon trading: Greenhouse-gas emissions from around 11,000 factories and power plants under the 27-nation European union (EU) trading scheme fell by 11%in 2009, according to preliminary,
The fall due to the recession meant that the EU handed out an excess of 60.6 million carbon credits (free permits to emit a tonne of carbon dioxide),
They base this interpretation on an analysis of stable carbon isotopes in preserved soil or'palaeosol',at the site;
oxygen and carbon isotopes in the enamel of mammalian teeth; the small-mammal fossils present;
It contains mechanisms intended to stabilize carbon prices and make costs predictable for industry (see go. nature. com/2mpfsn).
Business watch Investors are losing confidence in Monsanto, the agricultural biotech giant based in St louis,
Monsanto is being squeezed in the North american soya and maize market by the world's number-two seed company Dupont,
Alexander worries that Monsanto will cut prices to protect its share, which could potentially hurt its research budget.
But on 5 may, Carl Casale, Monsanto's executive vice-president and chief financial officer, said research spending was not in jeopardy.
given mounting evidence that boreal forests are important carbon stores. Protecting these forests and their soil,
which has enormous amounts of carbon, is a hugely important step forward, says Stuart Pimm, a conservation ecologist at Duke university in Durham, North carolina,
which constantly recycle atmospheric carbon through phases of growth and decay, boreal forests experience less decay and instead tend to pool carbon in soil and peat.
A recent study led by Sebastiaan Luyssaert, a biologist at the University of Antwerp, Belgium, found that mature boreal forests remain active carbon sinks rather than becoming carbon-neutral ecosystems as they mature (S. Luyssaert et al.
Nature 455 213-215; 2008). ) As long as they're alive, they keep accumulating carbon, says Luyssaert.
The northern circumpolar permafrost region, which includes most of the boreal forests earmarked for protection,
contains approximately 50%of the estimated global belowground organic carbon pool, according to a study co-authored by Josep Canadell, director of the Global Carbon Project in Canberra, Australia (C. Tarnocai et al.
Global Biogeochem. Cy. 23, GB2023; 2009). ) Canadell says that cutting down forests sometimes results in the drying out of wetlands and peat bogs and the release of their huge carbon stores
which hold an average of 7, 800 tonnes of carbon per hectare, far more than any other ecosystem.
But Werner Kurz, a senior researcher at the Canadian Forest Service in Victoria, British columbia, isn't sure that forest conservation is going to slow down warming.
and sequester carbon. We're still not sure exactly how useful these forests are going to be in mitigating global warming,
who heads the Canadian Carbon Program. That's why it makes sense to keep them intact until we figure it out.
Greenhouse-gas numbers up in the air: Nature Newsthe state of California is about to become a giant playground for more than 200 atmospheric scientists.
measuring an array of greenhouse gases, aerosols and other atmospheric properties as they fly over cities, industrial facilities and agricultural areas.
and reduce nagging uncertainties in the state's two-year-old inventory of greenhouse-gas emissions.
Developed countries that are party to the United nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) are required to report inventories of their yearly greenhouse-gas emissions.
and independent estimates suggest that the total reported emissions for some gases may be off by more than 50%.
scientists and governments need to develop a reliable system for verifying greenhouse-gas emissions around the globe.
computer models and satellites to assess the origin and amount of greenhouse-gas emissions. She sees the California programme as a model
calling for more detailed inventories from industrialized countries and an expansion and improvement of greenhouse-gas monitoring networks everywhere.
The NRC estimated that it would cost just US$11 million over five years to improve greenhouse-gas reporting systems among the 10 largest developing countries,
which account for more than half of the global greenhouse gases pumped into the atmosphere annually, and are the easiest to quantify.
Essentially all of the carbon in fossil fuels winds up in the atmosphere as carbon dioxide after combustion,
One of the best estimates for global carbon emissions comes from CDIAC, which collects information from the United nations,
and when greenhouse gases were emitted. CDIAC estimated global carbon dioxide emissions at 30.2 billion tonnes in 2006, not including changes in land use.
%And the picture gets fuzzier with other gases. The NRC report gave uncertainties ranging from below 25%to more than 100%for reported emissions of other greenhouse gases,
as well as carbon dioxide from agriculture and other land uses. In a quest to improve emissions estimates, scientists are pushing governments to expand their monitoring networks.
NOAA currently heads a network of some 150 greenhouse-gas monitoring stations around the world,
In Europe, scientists are pushing forward with the Integrated Carbon Observation System (ICOS), which aims by 2014 to convert a series of about 50 independent monitoring stations into a single network with uniform monitoring capabilities;
The state built its inventory for that gas using standard calculations recommended by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change,
researchers are developing new tools to differentiate between'natural'and fossil-fuel carbon in the atmosphere.
One technique relies on the radioactive isotope carbon-14, which occurs in trace amounts in atmospheric carbon dioxide.
This isotope is released taken up and by plants, but fossil fuels have no carbon-14 because it has a relatively short half-life
and they have been buried for millions of years. By taking air samples and measuring their carbon-14 content,
researchers can work out how much of the carbon dioxide comes from the biosphere and how much from fossil-fuel emissions.
Levin has been regularly measuring carbon-14 content in air samples from Germany using a version of a Geiger counter,
but Tans and other researchers have turned recently to accelerator mass spectrometry, which is faster and easier to scale up.
which included Tans, recommended ramping up annual carbon-14 measurements to 10,000 worldwide at a cost of $5 million to $10 million.
Such detailed monitoring should help scientists calibrate measurements from carbon-monitoring satellites. At present US and Japanese scientists are busy interpreting initial data from a Japanese satellite,
and NASA is planning to launch a second version of the Orbiting Carbon Observatory by 2013 (a rocket failure sent the first one hurtling into the Pacific ocean in February 2009).
Many see satellite measurements as a more reliable way to verify greenhouse-gas emissions. Everybody can look at the emissions of others in a very transparent way,
gases such as methane, nitrous oxide and various fluorine-containing compounds have a powerful warming effect and must be monitored as well.
The European commission and The netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency have teamed up to create an independent inventory for these lesser greenhouse gases.
A molecule of SF6 has nearly 24 000 times the warming power of a carbon dioxide molecule and remains in the atmosphere for around 3, 200 years,
which means that essentially all the SF6 ever emitted by humans is still in the atmosphere.
Levin's work suggests that SF6 emissions by industrialized countries could be twice as high as those reported to the UNFCCC (see'Keeping tabs on a greenhouse gas'.
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