Nature Newsa scheme to pay people in developing countries to curb carbon emissions from deforestation is plagued by'leakage'trees that aren't cut down in one forest are just cut down in another to provide people with the resources they would have foregone.
To be smart about using money to store carbon you should do it in a way that addresses the drivers inherently,
and thereby keeping carbon in the trees. The programme is currently providing support to 13 countries,
carbon payments that simply compensated people for the money they would lose by not converting forest to farmland fell short of people's needs.
which is half the price of carbon set by the European union's Emission Trading Scheme (about $24 per tonne).
It might be possible to increase safe carbon increase food security and have a positive impact on biodiversity for a pretty low cost,
Carbon targets On 17 may Britain extended existing pledges to limit greenhouse-gas emissions beyond 2020.
The establishment of such targets is required under 2008 legislation that mandates setting'carbon budgets'for consecutive five-year periods to 2050 墉 by
The 23 may study from the Climate Commission, The Critical Decade, urges immediate action to cut carbon emissions.
Cut black carbon Curbing ground-level ozone pollution and emissions of black carbon (soot particles) could cut half a degree from the global warming that is projected by 2030,
save tens of millions of lives and protect agricultural crops, according to a scientific assessment released on 14 june.
the report says that black-carbon emissions from vehicles, cooking stoves and other sources could be reduced,
welcomed the study's contribution to ensuring that forests are seen not by governments and the international community as just stocks of carbon.
carbon storage in the trees and soil, and recreational value. Woodlands are clustered around the Cambrian Mountains in central Wales.
But when non-market factors such as carbon storage are taken into account, the Cambrian Mountains are almost perfectly the wrong place to plant trees,
which stores high levels of carbon in the soil. Planting trees here would disrupt the peat carbon sink
and result in more carbon being emitted than is locked up in the trees. The report's authors call on the government to use their findings
and value analyses to guide future policy-making. Steve Albon, an ecologist at the James Hutton Institute in Aberdeen, UK,
The system will allow Asner to build on earlier work cataloguing forest carbon stocks in support of efforts to reduce deforestation (see'Taking stock of global carbon),
He says that the government needs to start investing in schemes to protect forest carbon
's carbon market. But after prices on the market plunged (see chart), such credits would have raised only  2. 3 billion as Nature went to press.
as the problems behind the slump weak economic conditions and an oversupply of carbon credits are likely to persist.
000 power stations and industrial plants that produce half of Europe s total carbon emissions but it is struggling in the economic downturn (see'European carbon market plummets'.
Alberta facilities can receive carbon credits by investing in a variety of Alberta-based projects.
These range from paying farmers to adopt low-till or no-till agricultural practices thereby turning fields into carbon sinks to the collection and combustion of landfill gas.
Lax verification for carbon-offset projects has been a problem for several schemes. For the credit-creating projects to be effective at reducing overall greenhouse-gas emissions,
and Water for allowing carbon credits for emissions-reducing activities that have become common practice.
Many opponents of emissions trading programmes also argue that companies are likely to purchase carbon offsets instead of reducing emissions by adopting new technologies
The report also praises Australia's Carbon Farming Initiative the world's first national legislation aimed at reducing carbon emissions from farming and forestry,
and investors to generate and trade carbon credits from farming and forestry projects, and could serve as a model for similar projects in other countries.
Carbon tax Australia will introduce a tax on carbon dioxide emissions from 1 july 2012, after the legislation passed its final barrier 墉 approval by the Senate 墉 on 8 november.
and release carbon, one of the least understood aspects of the global carbon cycle. Earthwatch has recruited more than 2,
and analyse soil samples to estimate how much carbon is captured. Forests play a huge role in regulating climates at global scale
"There are no long-term monitoring studies on biodiversity as well as carbon stocks, and very limited modelling studies on climate-change impacts, he says
All flights to or from Europe will have to buy carbon credits under the region's emissions trading scheme.
and are now demanding that poor countries sacrifice economic development to make carbon cuts. But other developing countries, acknowledging that most future emissions growth will come from once-poor nations,
The talks also moved closer to establishing a system that would allow payments to countries that reduce carbon emissions by preventing deforestation,
which countries can sell carbon credits for projects that lower greenhouse-gas emissions, such as renewable energy.
and store carbon emissions from power plants, allowing Western countries to finance these plants more cheaply in India or China.
with 5%of the carbon credits being set aside to account for any leakage of stored greenhouse gases in the 20 years after they are buried.
and expanding prospects for a low-carbon market and tourism. Although the study has been lauded for its innovative methodology,
Rapid measures to reduce emissions of black carbon, which soaks up solar energy, and methane, a greenhouse gas that is 25 Â times more potent than carbon dioxide,
the assessment ranked hundreds of  options for reducing black carbon and ozone pollution according to their potential to reduce warming.
Black-carbon reduction would focus on cleaning up diesel vehicle emissions biomass stoves, brick kilns and coke ovens.
Modelling suggests that, together, a 75%reduction in black carbon and a 40%reduction in methane emissions over the next two decades would lower projected warming by about 0. 5 °C by 2050.
Cuts to black carbon would yield the biggest reduction in warming in Africa, south Asia and the Arctic,
and black-carbon mitigation are intentionally keeping the agenda separate from the UN climate negotiations.
As scientists pin down exactly where anthropogenic carbon emissions are coming from, Marland says, they can separate out carbon uptake and emissions by plants and soils."
"The better we understand both the magnitude and distribution of human emissions, the better we understand what is happening in the biosphere.
Airline carbon row Global airlines are protesting a European law that requires them to pay for some of the carbon emissions from their flights using European airports.
defusing the carbon bombenvironmentalists and many politicians have called the oil sands a planetary-scale threat as they fight to prevent further development of the resource.
"We wanted to address the carbon-bomb question, Weaver says.""And frankly, these numbers aren t as big as
They modelled the effects on global climate of the carbon emissions that would result if all of the oil available in the Alberta reserves were to be burned.
burning every tonne of carbon underground would be virtually impossible. Restricting the analysis to proven reserves those believed to be economically viable using present technologies the duo calculated a temperature increase of 0. 02 °C. Taking into account the portion of the reserve that is already under active development,
But barring a precipitous drop in oil prices or a sudden imposition of carbon regulations, Canada will probably find customers for its oil one way or another.
Oil-sands vote ends in deadlockan attempt to assign a carbon footprint to oil obtained from oil sands,
all fuels must be assigned a default carbon footprint. However, policy-makers are stuggling to achieve this for oil-sands oil.
They generally recognize the higher carbon footprint of oil extracted from oil sands, but do not single them out with a separate value.
when calculating the overall carbon footprint for all of Europe's petrol from 2014 onwards. Environmentalists agree that oil obtained from different sources should have different carbon footprints
but few data are available on the actual emissions generated by other sources, and that because oil-sand oil is known to generate more emissions,
and Environment in Brussels."All fuels need correct carbon accounting to count their contribution, to reach the 6%greenhouse-gas reduction target,
and carbon-offset projects can result in the eviction of inhabitants of wooded areas that are bought up in exchange for carbon credits.
Although the official carbon market made little progress in last year s United nations Climate Change Conference in Durban, South africa,
the voluntary carbon market is still dispossessing local custodians of their lands. For example Green Resources, a forestry company based in Oslo,
A Dutch firm s carbon-offset project in Uganda s Mount Elgon National park became unmarketable after sustained conflict with local farmers who contest the group's right to the land.
to reduce carbon emissions, leave tropical forests standing. But a widely heralded approach in which rich nations would pay poorer ones to keep their forests intact has proved trickier to deploy than many had hoped.
Carbon payments would make it easier for landowners to earn a living without clearing more land.
soya and palm oil could have the greatest impact on carbon (see'Food versus forests').'With more than US$4 million in seed money from Norway, the consortium plans to announce an initial round of projects in the run-up to the UN Conference on Sustainable Development in Rio de janeiro (Rio+20) in Brazil in June.
The consortium is also looking at tackling overall greenhouse-gas emissions using carbon credits, which could be sold to private investors
and carbon emissions and secures a smaller area of forest than was thought. However, the Indonesian government has confirmed its commitment to its climate-change pledge by extending the protected area
and stripping a palm-oil firm of a permit to develop carbon-rich peatland.""No other country has done anything like this,
although that in itself won t do much to reduce carbon emissions. Norway s environment minister, B ¥rd Vegar Solhjell, acknowledges the limitations of the moratorium."
and carbon-storage potential than others, says William Laurance, a forest-conservation scientist at James Cook University in Cairns, Australia.
Laurance does commend the Indonesian government for protecting 11.5 million hectares of forests growing on carbon-rich peatland.
If deforested, these areas could release up to eight times more carbon into the atmosphere than would dryland forests growing on mineral soil.
and could explain a mysterious spike in carbon-14 levels in that year's growth rings in Japanese cedar trees.
when he heard about a team of researchers in Japan who had found an odd spike in carbon-14 levels in tree rings.
which carbon-14 is formed (see'Mysterious radiation burst recorded in tree rings').'But there was a problem:
and using the relative levels of carbon isotopes to pick out more exactly the origin of those fats in 29 of the samples.
Carbon isotopes from milk fat can also point to the sorts of food the dairy animals ate
as different plants incorporate varying amounts of carbon-13 relative to carbon-12. The team found that the milk fats came from a range of plants,
But carbon seems to be the touchiest subject internationally. China does not publish official figures for carbon dioxide emissions,
"China s real carbon emissions could be higher than our provincial aggregate estimate, or even lower than our national estimate.
and to devise a carbon trading system that will be tested in seven provinces and cities next year.
G. WOOD/AFP/GETTY IMAGESCARBON tax Australia introduced a carbon tax on 1 Â July, in
But vast swathes of forest have been cut down to make way for the crop, often in carbon-rich peatlands,
A recent life-cycle assessment suggested that it could take up to 220 years for a plantation to become carbon neutral (W. M. J. Achten and L. V. Verchot Ecol.
"It is possible to have carbon-neutral plantations if they are grown on already heavily logged and degraded land,
but annual carbon emissions associated with deforestation have not fallen nearly as much, says a Brazilian study that combines satellite data
The difference is in large part due to a natural lag as carbon stocks slowly decay
A direct conversion of that lost biomass into carbon would suggest a drop in annual carbon dioxide emissions from more than 1. 1 billion tonnes of CO2 in 2004 to 298 million tonnes of CO2 a reduction of nearly 74%.
and the fact that forest debris cut in one year might be burned in another (see Carbon lag).
but what we are trying to express is that this is a more correct way to understand carbon emissions,
He estimates that efforts to forestall deforestation in the Amazon have lowered Brazil s overall carbon emissions by roughly 17%since 2004.
allowing Brazilian scientists to provide annual estimates of both deforestation and carbon emissions, and setting the stage for a deeper analysis of the impacts of logging, agriculture and forest regrowth.
scientists do need to better understand the way carbon is cycling through forests. And she says the next major challenge is for INPE to build the effects of widespread logging operations into its emissions model."
Brazil s fund for low-carbon agriculture lies fallowrice cultivation has received a boost in Brazil
As of 2011, low-carbon agriculture money could be used to fund activities that caused emissions of other greenhouse gases,
or had nothing to do with carbon sequestration, such as organic agriculture. Farmers and ranchers can currently use ABC loans to buy cattle
Persuading farmers that going low-carbon is good for business will be difficult in a country where, this year,
the government has to be able to assess how well it is working to reduce carbon emissions,
for example, that"Brazilian soil labs simply aren prepared t to measure total soil carbon content. Assad s team has sampled several sites around the country
one hectare of recovered pasture could store four times as much carbon as one hectare of degraded pasture.
What is your position on cap-and-trade, carbon taxes, and other policies proposed to address global climate change
So I oppose steps like a carbon tax or a cap-and-trade system that would handicap the American economy
In two reports published today1, 2, the CGIAR says that reducing agriculture s carbon footprint is central to limiting climate change.
 Vermeulen and her colleagues examined for the first time the carbon emissions for all stages of the global food system.
or cancel a mission aimed at pinning down the mysterious carbon sinks that are slowing the rise of greenhouse gases in Earth s atmosphere.
) Neither Japan s existing Greenhouse Gases Observing Satellite nor NASA s Orbiting Carbon Observatory-2 (OCO-2),
Carbonsat s competitor for ESA funding, FLEX, would also help to pin down carbon sinks, by measuring the faint fluorescence generated by plants during photosynthesis a measure of how efficiently they absorb carbon."
"The last thing we want to do is to destroy the forests or whatever is absorbing almost half of the CO2 that we are emitting,
MÃ lanie Salque, a chemist at the University of Bristol, UK, used gas chromatography and carbon-isotope ratios to analyse molecules preserved in the pores of the ancient clay
of carbon emissions that they did not actually incur, says a report from CE Delft, a Dutch environmental consultancy group.
But scientists and environmentalists are pushing for an expanded effort to nurture low-carbon technologies.
and development that could drive down the cost of large-scale, low-carbon energy, and ultimately make a carbon tax or a cap-and-trade agreement politically palatable.
The President s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology has recommended increasing spending on energy research and development from around US$4 billion per year to $16 billion,
it is based not on carbon but on a latticework of boron and nitrogen atoms. Computer simulations have indicated that a rare crystalline form of boron nitride would resist indentation even better than diamond
Fungi and roots store a surprisingly large share of the world's carbonthe largest fraction of carbon held in the soils of northern forests may derive from the living
By some estimates, the planet's soils contain more than twice the carbon in the atmosphere.
and contain around 16%of total soil carbon. Until the last decade or so, most scientists had presumed that much of the decomposed organic matter, or humus
But when Lindahl and his colleagues carbon-dated samples taken at various depths throughout the soil on 30 islands in two Swedish lakes near the Arctic circle,
they found that accumulation of organic material on top of the ground alone could not explain the rates at which soil carbon built Up on islands larger than 1 hectare,
each square metre of soil accumulated in the past 100 years holds about 6. 2 kilograms of carbon.
But on islands smaller than 0. 1 hectare, the past century of soil contains a whopping 22.5 kilograms of carbon per square metre.
The difference in carbon-sequestration rates, the researchers report in Science1, can be explained entirely by carbon derived from the roots of trees and shrubs and their symbiotic fungi.
Whereas about 47%of the soil carbon on the large islands came from roots and ectomycorrhizal fungi
It is unclear why the small islands built up a larger fraction of root-and fungi-derived carbon in the past century,
while that trees divert carbon to their ectomycorrhizal fungi, but having 70%of soil carbon derive from them is much more than we could have expected,
she says. Benjamin Turner, a soil scientist at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Balboa, Panama, says that the findings are a"great example of how analyses of sequences of soils of different ages contribute to the understanding of processes that wouldn t
It is not clear how the results might affect estimates of how carbon sequestration in a warming climate
and a loss of soil carbon as carbon dioxide wafts into the atmosphere. But at the same time, he suggests,
as well as their roots and fungi, causing an ovrall increase in carbon sequestration
Will we kill off today's animals if we revive extinct ones? An article by Scientific American.
In the most extensive study of its kind1, an international team of scientists simulated the effect of business-as usual emissions on the amounts of carbon locked up in tropical forests across Amazonia, Central america, Asia and Africa through to 2100.
rainforests across the three regions retained their carbon stocks even as atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration increased throughout the century.
for every 1 °C rise in temperature, around 50 billion tonnes of carbon would be released from the tropics.
That tropical forests will retain their carbon stocks long term gives a major boost to policies aimed at keeping forests intact,
The Biomass project aims to take radar measurements of global forest biomass to assess terrestrial carbon stocks and fluxes.
and the failure of the agency s Orbiting Carbon Observatory and the solar monitoring and aerosol mission Glory (see Nature http://doi. org/bqjhn7;
But data on global forest biomass a major store of land carbon and a key indicator of biodiversity are no less important,
satellite observations are needed to quantify global carbon emissions for tropical forests, for which no reliable ground inventories exist.
Thomson Reuters Point Carbonprices for allowances to emit a tonne of carbon dioxide on Europe s carbon-trading market are likely to remain low until 2020,
This means that the market is unlikely to spur investment in low-carbon energy, one of the scheme s key goals when it was launched in 2005.
according to Carbon Tracker, even though burning them would cause a catastrophic rise in global temperatures. 24-25 april On World Malaria Day (25 april),
Experiment aims to steep rainforest in carbon dioxideone of the wild cards in climate change is the fate of the Amazon rainforest.
A dying rainforest could release gigatonnes of carbon into  the atmosphere, accelerating warming; a  CO2-fertilized forest could have the opposite effect,
sucking up carbon and putting the brakes on climate change. Climate modellers trying to build carbon fertilization into their forecasts have had  precious few data to go on."
"The number one question is, how will tropical forests react if we put more CO2 into the atmosphere?
Because of the sheer volume of carbon cycling through the tropics, the fertilization effect has a massive impact on the amount of carbon that forests take up globally and on how much remains in the atmosphere.
Persistent organic pollutants (POPS) are based carbon compounds that are resistant to break-down. Some originate from the burning of fuel or the processing of electronic waste,
Land plants create a huge carbon sink as they suck CO2 out of the air to build leaves
That lowers annual carbon uptake by 150 Â million tonnes equivalent to more than 15%of Europe s annual man-made CO2 emissions.
The most extreme events can turn forests and grasslands from carbon sinks to sources. In 2003 alone, a record-breaking heatwave in Europe led to the release of more CO2 than is locked up normally over four years1.
Researchers have presumed that this triggered a large carbon release but such responses are hard to predict.
which stores carbon in leaves, roots and soil. It had a smaller effect on soil respiration,
which releases carbon, so the net result was a decline in carbon uptake. The experiments also showed that plants
and soils keep a memory of disturbances, says Michael Bahn, an ecologist at the University of Innsbruck in Austria who oversees a grassland experiment.
and found that later ones had a larger effect on net carbon release. Existing biosphere models do not capture such effects,
The world s soils contain almost 100 Â gigatonnes of carbon twice as much as the entire atmosphere.
Carbon tax scrapped Australia will shift from a carbon tax to an emissions trading system for greenhouse gases one year ahead of schedule, announced Prime minister Kevin Rudd on 16 Â July.
The move is expected to lower the price of carbon from about US$23 a tonne to around $6 a tonne beginning in July 2014,
require a 6%drop in the carbon footprint of transport fuel by 2020, by which time renewable energy must fuel 10%of the transport sector.
peatlands and wetlands rich in sequestered carbon causing large emissions of carbon dioxide.""It s kind of obvious if you think about it,
The numbers are different for different crops (see Carbon conundrum. But overall, when land-use effects are taken into account,
The effect wipes out more than two-thirds of the carbon emissions that Europe s renewable-energy policy was supposed to save by 2020,
a hint that the official carbon footprint of Europe s transport fuel might eventually incorporate that science.
Northern forests rev up carbon cyclenorthern forests are not just surviving but thriving, despite concerns about droughts, wildfires and bark beetles surging as the world warms.
Ecosystem productivity is rising at high latitudes, with a roughly 50%increase in the amount of carbon cycling through northern landscapes since the 1950s,
Boreal forests in particular have shown marked increases in carbon uptake during summer.""Something quite massive is taking place on large parts of the landscape that are impacted not directly by humans,
Instead, it seems to be driven primarily by a significant increase in carbon uptake by boreal forests to the south during the prime growing months of June and July.
which advises on carbon pricing and emissions cuts, and the Clean Energy Finance Corporation, a green bank that was due to invest Aus$10 Â billion (US$9. 4 Â billion) over the next five years in renewable-energy projects.
would enhance carbon storage and reduce the risk of the catastrophic fires that threaten lives and property,
and pour carbon into the atmosphere. That these reasons hold little water with the protesters highlights an emerging fissure among environmentalists and ecologists.
Congo carbon plan kicks offthe data will also enhance scientists understanding of tropical forests role in global climate regulation."
who has mapped already out carbon across the world s tropics, but at relatively low resolution of 1 kilometre.
His calculations suggest that the DRC s forests contain 22 billion to 24 Â billion tonnes of carbon,
to produce a measure of carbon for all 155 million hectares of jungle.""We have limited only areas where it s safe to land.
and in the past few years Peru has mapped the carbon in its part of the Amazon (see Nature 461,1048-1052;
) Brazil has made less-detailed assessments of forest carbon, but its system for monitoring deforestation is the world s most advanced.
and ultimately to verify reductions in such losses and sell carbon offsets. Matthew Hansen, a remote-sensing scientist at the University of Maryland in College Park who works with forest mappers in Kinshasa, says that the DRC project faces hurdles.
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