Developing countries are focusing on policies to reduce emissions growth and set up low-carbon development.
The government is also rethinking its position on the role of forest carbon in a future climate treaty.
cio Lula da Silva appointed a task force to study the issue after nine governors representing Amazon states urged him in June to reconsider Brazil's policy on carbon markets,
That panel has proposed allowing nations to offset up to 10%of their commitment by purchasing carbon credits for avoided deforestation.
Orbiting Carbon Observatory plan re-emerges after splashdown On 24 february a payload shroud stayed stuck to a Taurus booster rocket,
and NASA's US$280 million Orbiting Carbon Observatory (OCO) crashed into the sea, dashing the hopes of scientists who wanted to use the satellite to measure sources
and the carbon they contain. But just how much carbon is at stake? Researchers at the meeting have given their best answer yet:
the first satellite-based estimates of the biomass contained in the world's tropical forests. Current biomass estimates for the tropics are gathered based on data by the Food and agriculture organization of the united nations (FAO),
recently estimated to be around 15%of global carbon emissions (G r. van der Werf et al. Nature Geosci. 2, 737-738;
and other scientists to estimate how much carbon is locked within trees, vegetation and soils on a given patch of land rather than relying on rough averages that are calculated across a forest.
Sassan Saatchi, an environmental scientist at NASA's Jet propulsion laboratory in Pasadena, California, worked on one study with researchers at the carbon consulting firm Winrock International in Arlington, Virginia.
South america comes in with about 145 gigatonnes of carbon in vegetation and soils about 26%higher than what has been reported by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC.
a geographer at the World bank in WASHINGTON DC, is to produce better estimates for carbon emissions from deforestation.
if forests are going to be linked to international carbon markets. The new pantropical biomass maps from Saatchi and Woods Hole won't accomplish that goal,
but they can provide scientists and policy-makers with a better understanding of carbon trends. For example
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.
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,
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
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.
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
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,
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,
Their analysis revealed that the relative amount of carbon-13 in maple syrup seemed to have gone down since the 1970s.
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.
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.
The term geoengineering covers everything from mundane methods for increasing carbon storage in plants soils
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.
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).
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.
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,
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;
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.
but fossil fuels have no carbon-14 because it has a relatively short half-life and they have been buried for millions of years.
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,
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).
which keeps carbon sequestered in native soils, savannahs and forests (J. A. Burney et al. Proc.
whether the carbon savings from land use would outweigh the increased agricultural emissions, says David Lobell,
and the carbon savings are quite large. All other things being equal, the researchers found that agricultural advances between 1961 and 2005 spared a portion of land larger than Russia from development
Averaged over the study period, investments in agricultural yields reduced carbon emissions at a cost of around $4 per tonne of carbon dioxide equivalent,
less than a quarter of the going price for emissions permits under Europe's carbon-trading scheme.
a major carbon storehouse. The debate began with a 2007 study1 that used data gathered by NASA's Terra satellite to argue that the canopy of the Amazon rainforest grew
not only boosts growth and carbon uptake, but could also offset reductions in precipitation thus increasing resilience to drought, says Peter Cox of the University of Exeter, UK,
the London-based think tank. The report's authors suggest that fighting illegal logging is a cheap way to prevent carbon emissions produced
Such decreases may have cost as little as $2. 50 per tonne of carbon, as compared to a cost of $18 per tonne in the European union carbon trading scheme.
The reasons for the decline vary by country. In Cameroon, donor countries insisted that an independent observer of forests be installed.
Illegal logging may be more cost-effective than carbon trading, but we should not forget that energy efficiency
and fuel wood and in some cases to earn money from selling carbon credits under the Clean Development Mechanism established in 2001 as part of the Kyoto Protocol.
They are only good to store carbon, he says. This distinction between native and nonnative trees is important for an accurate picture of the state of the world's forests,
Laurance says he is hopeful that the United nations'REDD+initiative to reduce carbon emissions from deforestation and forest degradation
All that sugary food means that the stressed-out insects are ingesting foods richer in carbon and poorer in nitrogen than their calmer,
The result is a body that is made of significantly more carbon and less nitrogen and thus makes poorer fertilizer
A study published in Science last year suggests that the drought reduced cumulative carbon storage in affected areas by some 1. 6 gigatonnes3.
and assess the broader impacts of drought on carbon storage. Having a second set of data to analyse certainly won't hurt.
And if the carbon sample removed for analysis actually contains material from more than one source,
Money will be raised by selling 300 million carbon credits from the European union's emissions trading scheme for greenhouse gases;
and as such it fetches a high price on the carbon market. The London-based Environmental Investigation Agency (EIA) estimates that Europe will have spent roughly 6 billion euros on payments for HFC-23 destruction by 2012 75 times more than the 80 million euros companies receiving
Meanwhile, the executive board of the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) the emissions-trading scheme to meet the greenhouse-gas reduction targets set by the Kyoto Protocol in August put a hold on issuing carbon credits
They performed carbon-isotope analyses on soil layers and studied fossilized plant materials to work out how the land was used.
among other things, scientists will use the data collected to track how much carbon is released taken up
and forest degradation (known as REDD) and augmenting the carbon stocks locked up in forests. Collectively, the programme is called REDD-plus.
which are a reservoir of biodiversity and carbon, he adds. More a confirmation than a surprise was that in the past 15 years
'Blue carbon'plan takes shape: Nature Newsan international effort to protect coastal wetlands by assigning them carbon credits kicked off last week in Paris. The aim is to do for some wetland plants mangroves, seagrasses and salt marshes
-what carbon credits have done for trees. Wetland plants and forests act as carbon sinks, locking away substantial amounts of carbon absorbed from the atmosphere.
The ocean absorbs some 25%of the world's carbon-dioxide emissions, and in its watery depths are acres of seagrass meadows that use about 15%of the dissolved carbon to grow.
Mangroves and salt-marsh vegetation similarly accumulate carbon and when they decompose their carbon is locked away in watery, peaty sediments for millennia.
Yet the world's coastal wetlands have been in continuous decline over the past century and now cover just 2%of the seabed1.
Between 1980 and 2005, nearly 35,000 square kilometres of mangroves were cleared so that coastal land could be used for agriculture, aquaculture and beach resorts.
When coastal wetlands are drained, the soil is oxidized and carbon dioxide is released into the air, contributing to climate change.
The'blue carbon'concept aims to protect some of the most endangered wetlands by assigning credits to their stored carbon2.
The credits can then be traded on a carbon market explains Emily Pidgeon, director of the marine climate change programme at Conservation International,
the environmental group in WASHINGTON DC that has been promoting the concept alongside the International Union for Conservation of Nature in Gland, Switzerland,
For starters, no one knows how much carbon is stored by wetlands around the world-largely because no one knows exactly how many seagrass beds
and cannot tell the difference between the desirable grasses that store carbon, sea lettuce that stores little carbon and algae attached to rocks.
Data from Landsat satellites revealed the true extent of mangroves only last year. The survey found that in 2000,
Oceanographer Christoph Heinze at the University of Bergen, Norway, points out that the carbon sequestration abilities of wetland plants are
quite literally, a drop in the ocean compared with Earth's other carbon sinks. But Crooks points out that marine carbon circulation models have tended to consider wetlands'current carbon sequestration abilities,
yet ignore the impact of releasing thousands of years of stored carbon when the lands are dried out.
Pidgeon acknowledges that a financial system such as blue carbon credits is at least a decade down the line.
But pilot carbon credit projects will begin this year, she says, in parallel with further efforts to quantify the scale of Earth's wetlands
and how much carbon they hold.
Seven days: 11 17 february 2011: Nature Newspolicy Business Events Research People Trend watch Coming up Policy EU funding reform The European commission has launched a public consultation on the future of Europe's main research-funding mechanism.
The current system, the 7-year, ¢ 50.5-billion (US$68. 3-billion) Seventh Framework Programme, will end in 2013.
Under the agreement, 21 forestry companies and 9 environmental groups are discussing ways to preserve large sections of Canada's northern forest a big storehouse of carbon and a crucial habitat for the threatened woodland caribou
and recent studies have raised serious questions about early anthropogenic carbon and methane emissions. But rather than backing down,
The result is roughly double the carbon emissions compared with earlier estimates. Ruddiman also took issue with a high-profile Nature study3 published in 2009 by a team at the University of Bern,
The study takes advantage of the fact that plants preferentially take up the isotope carbon-12,
subtly altering the ratio between carbon-12 and carbon-13 in the atmosphere. Stocker and his team analysed an Antarctic ice core
if carbon from cleared vegetation were released back into the atmosphere. But that study underestimated the amount of carbon-12 taken up by peatlands
say Ruddiman and Kaplan. It assumed that just 40 gigatonnes of carbon were buried in peatlands during the late Holocene,
whereas other estimates come in at 280 gigatonnes or more. That number would have to be offset by terrestrial emissions to maintain the atmospheric carbon isotope ratio.
In an e-mail to Nature, Stocker said that Ruddiman's latest paper merely reiterates in extenso all of the points made earlier.
he cited a recent analysis by his institute suggesting that carbon emissions from land-use change are neither sufficient nor properly timed to explain the rise in CO2 levels in the Holocene4.
Counting the carbon cost of peatland conversion: Nature Newsup to 6%of carbon-rich peat-swamp forests had been cleared in Peninsular Malaysia
and on the islands of Borneo and Sumatra to make way for oil-palm plantations by the early 2000s,
Published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences1, the study is the first attempt to systematically assign a value to the carbon loss due to peatland destruction in Southeast asia that can be attributed directly to conversion to oil-palm plantations.
Like most forests, peat-swamp forests store large amounts of carbon above ground as biomass
They also store large amounts of carbon in their soils, as dead organic matter decomposes slowly under marshy conditions.
Koh and his colleagues calculate that this conversion led to the release of about 140 million tonnes of carbon from biomass above ground
and 4. 6 million tonnes of carbon from peat oxidation below ground. Indonesia is among the largest contributors to carbon emissions,
says Koh. And a quarter to a third of global greenhouse-gas emissions are the result of land-use change in forests,
Push for carbon tax Australia's prime minister Julia Gillard has proposed placing a fixed tax on carbon dioxide from July 2012,
It is the third time that Australia's government has vowed to tax carbon emissions to tackle climate change;
Gillard's predecessor Kevin Rudd twice failed to get a carbon-cutting bill past his Senate.
Carbon-rich mangroves ripe for conservation: Nature Newsmangrove forests in tropical regions of the Indian and Pacific oceans store more carbon than previously recognized,
according to a study published today in Nature Geoscience1. The findings indicate that much of the carbon in such forests is found in the surrounding soil,
which is rich in organic material. Cutting down mangrove forests, which occupy less than 1%of tropical forest area,
could therefore contribute up to 10%of global carbon emissions from deforestation. Although carbon reserves in other types of tropical wetland forest have been assessed,
the amount of carbon in mangroves has been ignored largely, even though they are present in more than 100 countries.
For example, it is estimated that clearing of tropical peatlands, which also contain carbon-rich soils, produces about a quarter of all deforestation emissions.
The extent of mangrove forests has declined by as much as 50%over the past half century because of development, over-harvesting and aquaculture,
so estimating their carbon reserves will be important for future strategies to reduce climate change. To estimate the abundance of carbon in mangroves, lead investigator J. Boone Kauffman, an ecologist at the Northern Research Station of the US Forest Service in Durham
New hampshire, and his team sampled 25 mangrove sites across a broad territory that included Micronesia, Indonesia and Bangladesh.
Kauffman and his team assessed aboveground and belowground carbon pools in mangrove sites occupying estuaries and oceanic settings, such as island coasts.
They found that these forests hold much more carbon than do boreal, temperate or tropical upland forests especially in an organic-rich'muck layer'of soil more than 30 centimetres below the surface.
accounting for more than 70%of total carbon stores in estuarine mangroves and upwards of 50%in those in oceanic zones.
the researchers predict that worldwide carbon reserves in mangrove forests may be as high as 25%of those in tropical peatlands,
and understanding the significant pool of carbon in mangrove ecosystems, says Shimon Anisfeld, an expert in coastal ecology at Yale university in New haven,
and the effect of land-use changes on carbon release from soils. They may even be overestimates,
referring to an international plan to pay developing countries to preserve forests in a bid to help reduce global carbon emissions.
Mangrove forests are important for diversity, for coastal stability and for carbon, based on this paper. It gives another justification for preserving mangrove forests.
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