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Flowering Corymbia ficifolia, Austins Ferry, Tasmania, Australia.

Biosequestration is the capture and storage of the atmospheric greenhouse gas carbon dioxide by an increased volume or quality of photosynthesis (through practices such as reforestation/preventing deforestation and genetic engineering respectively), enhanced soil carbon trapping in agriculture, as well as the use of algal biosequestration (see algae bioreactor) to absorb the constant stream of carbon dioxide emissions from coal-fired electricity generation. It has been crucial to the initiation, evolution and preservation of life and is a key policy concept in the climate change mitigation debate. It does not generally refer to the sequestering of carbon dioxide in oceans (see carbon sequestration) or rock formations, depleted oil or gas reservoirs (see oil depletion and peak oil), deep saline aquifers, or deep coal seams (see coal mining) (for all see geosequestration) or through the use of industrial chemical carbon dioxide scrubbing.

The importance of plants in storing atmospheric carbon dioxide

Kew Gardens Waterlily House. David Iliff, 2008

]After water vapour (concentrations of which humans have limited capacity to influence) carbon dioxide is the most abundant and stable greenhouse gas in the atmosphere (methane rapidly reacts to form water vapour and carbon dioxide). Atmospheric carbon dioxide has increased from about 280 ppm in 1750 to 383 ppm in 2007 and is increasing at an average rate of 2 ppm pr year. The world's oceans have previously played an important role in sequestering atmospheric carbon dioxide through solubility and the action of phytoplankton. Acidification of the oceans and other factors associated with anthropogenic climate change have recently decreased this capacity significantly. This, and the likely adverse consequences for humans and the biosphere of associated global warming, increases the significance of investigating policy mechanisms for encouraging biosequestration.

Reforestation, Avoided Deforestation and LULUCF

Reforestation and reducing deforestation can increase biosequestration in four ways. Pandani (Richea pandanifolia) near Lake Dobson, Mt Field National Park, Tasmania, Australia

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) estimates that the cutting down of forests is now contributing close to 20 per cent of the overall greenhouse gases entering the atmosphere. Candell and Raupach argue that there are four primary ways in which reforestation and reducing deforestation can increase biosequestration. First, by increasing the volume of existing forest. Second, by increasing the carbon density of existing forests at a stand and landscape scale. Third, by expanding the use of forest products that will sustainably replace fossil-fuel emissions. Fourth, by reducing carbon emissions that are caused from deforestation and degradation.
A recent report by the Australian CSIRO found that forestry and forest-related options are the most significant and most easily achieved carbon sink making up 105 Mt per year CO2-e or about 75 per cent of the total figure attainable for the Australian state of Queensland from 2010-2050. Among the forestry options, the CSIRO report announced, forestry with the primary aim of carbon storage (called carbon forestry) clearly has the highest attainable carbon storage capacity (77 Mt CO2-e/yr) and is one of the easiest options to implement compared with biodiversity plantings, pre-1990 eucalypts, post 1990 plantations and managed regrowth. Legal strategies to encourage this form of biosequestration include permanent protection of forests in National Parks or on the World Heritage List, properly funded management and bans on use of rainforest timbers and inefficient uses such as woodchipping old growth forest.

Strickland Falls, Tasmania, Australia.

As a result of lobbying by the developing country caucus (or Group of 77) in the United Nations (associated with the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED) in Rio de Janeiro, the non-legally binding Forest Principles were established in 1992. These linked the problem of deforestation to third world debt and inadequate technology transfer and stated that the "agreed full incremental cost of achieving benefits associated with forest conservation...should be equitably shared by the international community" (para1(b)). Subsequently the Group of 77 argued in the 1995 Intergovernmental Panel on Forests (IPF) and then the 2001 Intergovernmental Forum on Forests (IFF), for affordable access to environmentally sound technologies without the stringency of intellectual property rights; while developed states there rejected demands for a forests fund. The expert group crated under the United Nations Forum on Forests (UNFF) reported in 2004, but in 2007 developed nations again vetoed language in the principles of the final text which might confirm their legal responsibility under international law to supply finance and environmentally sound technologies to the developing world.

Settlement and deforestation surrounding the Brazilian town of Rio Branco are seen here in the striking "herring bone" deforestation patterns that cut through the rainforest. NASA, 2008.

In December 2007, after a two year debate on a proposal from Papua New Guinea and Costa Rica, state parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (FCCC) agreed to explore ways of reducing emissions from deforestation and to enhance forest carbon stocks in developing nations.The underlying idea is that developing nations should be financially compensated if they succeed in reducing their levels of deforestation (through valuing the carbon that is stored in forests); a concept termed 'avoided deforestaion (AD) or, REDD if broadened to include reducing forest degradation (see Reducing emissions from deforestation and forest degradation). Under the free market model advocated by the countries who have formed the Coalition of Rainforest Nations, developing nations with rainforests would sell carbon sink credits under a free market system to Kyoto Protocol Annex I states who have exceeded their emissions allowance. Brazil (the state with the largest area of tropical rainforest) however, opposes including avoided deforestation in a carbon trading mechanism and instead favors creation of a multilateral development assistance fund created from donations by developed states.For REDD to be successful science and regulatory infrastructure related to forests will need to increase so nations may inventory all their forest carbon, show that they can control land use at the local level and prove that their emissions are declining.

NASA Earth Observatory, 2009. Deforestation in Malaysian Borneo.

The United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) Article 4(1)(a) requires all Parties to "develop, periodically update, publish and make available to the Conference of the Parties" as well as "national inventories of anthropogenic emissions by sources" "removals by sinks of all greenhouse gases not controlled by the Montreal Protocol." Under the UNFCCC reporting guidelines, human-induced greenhouse emissions must be reported in six sectors: energy (including stationary energy and transport); industrial processes; solvent and other product use; agriculture; waste; and land use, land use change and forestry (LULUCF).The rules governing accounting and reporting of greenhouse gas emissions from LULUCF under theKyoto Protocol are contained in several decisions of the Conference of Parties under the UNFCCC and LULUCF has been the subject of two major reports by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). The Kyoto Protocol article 3.3 thus requires mandatory LULUCF accounting for afforestation (no forest for last 50 years), reforestation (no forest on 31 December 1989) and deforestation, as well as (in the first commitment period) under article 3.4 voluntary accounting for cropland management, grazing land management, revegetation and forest management (if not already accounted under article 3.3).

Continent of Australia from space. Australia is a major producer of fossil fuels and has significant problems with deforestation.
Deforestation in Haiti. NASA, 2008.

As an example, the Australian National Greenhouse Gas Inventory (NGGI) prepared in compliance with these requirements indicates that the energy sector accounts for 69 per cent of Australia’s emissions, agriculture 16 per cent and LULUCF six per cent. Since 1990, however, emissions from the energy sector have increased 35 per cent (stationary energy up 43% and transport up 23%). By comparison, emissions from LULUCF have fallen by 73%. However, questions have been raised by Andrew Macintosh about the veracity of the estimates of emissions from the LULUCF sector because of discrepancies between the Australian Federal and Queensland Governments’ land clearing data. Data published by the Statewide Landcover and Trees Study (SLATS) in Queensland, for example, show that the total amount of land clearing in Queensland identified under SLATS between 1989/90 and 2000/01 is approximately 50 per cent higher than the amount estimated by the Australian Federal Government’s National Carbon Accounting System (NCAS) between 1990 and 2001.
Satellite imaging has become crucial in obtaining data on levels of deforestation and reforestation. Landsat satellite data, for example, has been used to map tropical deforestation as part of NASA’s Landsat Pathfinder Humid Tropical Deforestation Project, a collaborative effort among scientists from the University of Maryland, the University of New Hampshire, and NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center. The project yielded deforestation maps for the Amazon Basin, Central Africa, and Southeast Asia for three periods in the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s.

Enhanced photosynthesis

Sprekelia formosissima in Tasmania, Australia.
Hakea epiglottis, Cape Raoul, Tasman Peninsula, Tasmania, Australia.

Biosequestration may be enhanced by improving photosynthetic efficiency by modifying RuBisCO genes in plants to increase the catalytic and/or oxygenation activity of that enzyme.

One such research area involves increasing the Earth's proportion of C4 carbon fixation photosynthetic plants. C4 plants represent about 5% of Earth's plant biomass and 1% of its known plant species, but account for around 30% of terrestrial carbon fixation. In leaves of C3 plants, captured photons of solar energy undergo photosynthesis which assimilates carbon into carbohydrates (triosephosphates) in the chloroplasts of the mesophyll cells. The primary CO2 fixation step is catalysed by ribulose-1,5-bisphosphate carboxylase/oxygenase (Rubisco) which reacts with O2 leading to photorespiration that protects photosynthesis from photoinhibition but wastes 50% of potentially fixed carbon. The C4 photosynthetic pathway, however, concentrates CO2 at the site of the reaction of Rubisco, thereby reducing the biosequestration-inhibiting photorespiration. A new frontier in crop science consists of attempts to genetically engineer C3 staple food crops (such as wheat, barley, soybeans, potatoes and rice) with the "turbo-charged" photosynthetic apparatus of C4 plants.

Biochar

Biochar (charcoal created by pyrolysis of biomass) is a potent form of longterm (thousands of years) biosequestration of atmosphereic C02 derived from investigation of the extremely fertile Terra preta soils of the Amazon Basin. Placing biochar in soils also improves water quality, increases soil fertility, raises agricultural productivity and reduce pressure on old growth forests. As a method of generating bio-energy with carbon storage Rob Flanagan and the EPRIDA biochar company have developed low-tech cooking stoves for developing nations that can burn agricultural wastes such as rice husks and produce 15% by weight of biochar; while BEST Energies in NSW Australia have spent a decade developing an Agrichar technology that can combust96 tonnes of dry biomass each day, generating 30-40 tonnes of biochar.A parametric study of biosequestration by Malcolm Fowles at the Open University, indicated that to mitigate global warming, policies should encourage displacement of coal with biomass as a power source for baseload electricity generation if the latter’s conversion efficiency rose over 30%, otherwise biosequestering carbon from biomass as a cheaper mitigation option than geosequestration by CO2 capture and storage.

Improved agricultural and farming practices

Panicum virgatum switchgrass, valuable in biofuel production, soil conservation and biosequestration

Zero-till farming practices occur where there is much mulching but ploughing is not used, so that the carbon-rich organic matter in soil is not exposed to atmospheric oxygen, or to the leaching and erosion effects of rainfall. Over grazing is reduced by moving cattle and sheep away from grazed areas for several months. Ceasing ploughing has been alleged to encourage more ants to become predators of wood-eating (and C02 generating) termites, allows weeds to regenerate soils and helps slow water flows over the land.
Dedicated biofuel and biosequestration crops, such as switchgrass (panicum virgatum), are also being developed. It requires from 0.97 to 1.34 GJ fossil energy to produce 1 tonne of switchgrass, compared with 1.99 to 2.66 GJ to produce 1 tonne of corn. Given that switchgrass contains approximately 18.8 GJ/ODT of biomass, the energy output-to-input ratio for the crop can be up to 20:1.

Biosequestration can also be enhanced by farmers choosing crops species that produce large numbers of phytoliths. Phytoliths are microscopic spherical shells of silicon that can store carbon for thousands of years.

Biosequestration and climate change policy

Biosequestration could be critical to climate change mitigation till cleaner forms of power generation are established. The Nesjavellir Geothermal Power Plant in Þingvellir, Iceland
Windmills D4 (nearest) to D1 on the Thornton Bank

Industries with large amounts of C02 emissions (such as the coal industry) are interested in biosequestration as a means of offsetting their greenhouse gas production. In Australia, university researchers are engineering algae to produce biofuels (hydrogen and biodiesel oils) and investigating whether this process can be used to biosequester carbon. Algae naturally capture sunlight and use its energy to split water into hydrogen, oxygen and oil which can be extracted. Such clean energy production also can be coupled with desalination using salt-tolerant marine algae to generate fresh water and electricity.

Many new bioenergy (biofuel) technologies, including cellulosic ethanol biorefineries (using stems and branches of most plants including crop residues such as corn stalks, wheat straw and rice straw) are being promoted because they have the added advantage of biosequestration of C02. The Garnaut Climate Change Review recommends that a carbon price in a carbon emission trading scheme could include a financial incentive for biosequestration processes.

Garnaut recommends the use of algal biosequestration (see algae bioreactor) to absorb the constant stream of carbon dioxide emissions from coal-fired electricity generation and metal smelting until renewable forms of energy, such as solar and wind power, become more established contributors to the grid. The United Nations Collaborative Programme on Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation in Developing Countries (UN-REDD Programme) is a collaboration between FAO, UNDP and UNEP under which a trust fund established in July 2008 allows donors to pool resources to generate the requisite transfer flow of resources to significantly reduce global emissions from deforestation and forest degradation. The UK government's Stern Review on the economics of climate change argued that curbing deforestation was a "highly cost-effective way of reducing greenhouse gas emissions".

James Hansen in a recent book and open letter to President Obama about policies to reduce carbon emissions, has advocated phasing out coal-fired power plants that lack adequate carbon capture and storage (through either geosequestration or biosequestration in the form of, for example, algal biosequestration (see algae bioreactor). In Storms of My Grandchildren, for example, Hansen discusses his Declaration of Stewardship the first principle of which requires "a moratorium on coal-fired power plants that do not capture and sequester carbon dioxide". Hansen also argues for imposing a carbon tax at source on those who mine carbon as oil, gas or coal to provide a regular dividend to members of society (equal shares on a per capita basis) at a level inversely proportional to their carbon footprint, thus encouraging, he claims, amongst other things, agricultural and forestry practices improved in terms of their carbon trapping potential.

Philosophical basis of biosequestration

The arguments for biosequestration are often shaped in terms of economic theory, yet there is a well-recognised quality of life dimension to this debate. Biosequestration assists human beings to increase their collective and individual contributions to the essential resources of the biosphere. The policy case for biosequestration overlaps with principles of ecology, sustainability and sustainable development, as well as biosphere, biodiversity and ecosystem protection, environmental ethics, climate ethics and natural conservation.

Barriers to increased global biosequestration

Russell Falls, Mt Field National Park, Tasmania, Australia.
Lassen National Park, Kings Creek, USA.

The Garnaut Climate Change Review notes many barriers to increased global biosequestration. "There must be changes in the accounting regimes for greenhouse gases. Investments are required in research, development and commercialisation of superior approaches to biosequestration. Adjustments are required in the regulation of land use. New institutions will need to be developed to coordinate the interests in utilisation of biosequestration opportunities across small business in rural communities. Special efforts will be required to unlock potential in rural communities in developing countries." Saddler and King have argued that biosequestration and agricultural greenhouse gas emissions should not be handled within a global emissions trading scheme because of difficulties with measuring such emissions, problems in controlling them and the burden that would be placed on numerous small-scale farming operations. Collett likewise maintains that REDD credits (post-facto payments to developing countries for reducing their deforestation rates below an historical or projected reference rate), simply create a complex market approach to this global public health problem that reduces transparency and accountability when targets are not met and will not be as effective as developed nations voluntarily funding countries to keep their rainforests.

The World Rainforest Movement has argued that poor developing countries could be pressured to accept reforestation projects under the Kyoto Protocol's Clean Development Mechanism in order to earn foreign exchange simply to pay off the interest on debt to the World Bank.Tensions also exist over forest management between the sovereignty claims of nations states, arguments about common heritage of mankind and the rights of indigenous peoples and local communities; the Forest Peoples Programme (FPP) arguing the anti-deforestation programs could merely allow financial benefits to flow to national treasuries, privilege would-be corporate forest degraders who manipulate the system by periodically threatening forests, rather than local communities who conserve them. The success of such projects will also depend on the accuracy of the baseline data and the number of countries involved. Further, it has been argued that if biosequestration is to play a significant role in mitigating anthropogenic climate change then coordinated policies should set a goal of achieving global forest cover to its extent prior to the industrial revolution in the 1800s.

References

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