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UN body asks Lund Researchers to investigate new type of carbon sink

November 09, 2001

Trade in emission rights is intended to reduce global emissions of greenhouse gases. Countries with natural carbon sinks—areas that absorb more carbon dioxide than they give off—can ‘trade off’ that resource in return for their commitments to reduce emissions. Thus far this has largely involved forests. But now a new and interesting possibility has turned up in the debate. The UN Food and Agricultural Organization, FAO, has now signed an agreement with MICLU (Center for Environmental Research at Lund University in Sweden) to investigate just how this new alternative could be put to practical use.

Forests are the carbon sinks that have been most widely discussed in deliberations about the so-called Kyoto Protocol. According to some scientists, huge quantities of carbon dioxide can be absorbed and stored by large forests. Others are more skeptical about this, concerned that there is a risk of future leakage.

Rich countries in the industrialized world are eager to discuss forests as carbon sinks; they stand to gain the most since most extensive forests are found within their territories. What is beginning to be discussed now—at the UN Conference on the Environment in Marrakesh this week, for instance—is a carbon sink that many claim is more suitable than forests. It involves millions of hectares of over-exploited and depleted agricultural land in the Third World. It has been exhausted of its nutrients and its soil has been eroded. If land use is enhanced in these areas so they can become more productive, carbon will be taken from the atmosphere and stored in the soil in the form of mulch substances. What MICLU is now going to do, together with IIASA (International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis in Austria), is to set up a global knowledge base on how this can be implemented in practice.

“It is possible that investments in improved land use among indigent farmers in the Third World could be financed by trade in emission rights for carbon dioxide,” says MICLU Director Lennart Olsson. He adds:

“Nations in the Third World are without doubt the biggest losers in future greenhouse effects, even though they can hardly be blamed at all for the rise of the problem. If measures to reduce the risk of climatic change can simultaneously contribute to favorable developments in the Third World, then we clearly have a win-win situation.”

VetenskapsrÃ�det (The Swedish Research Council)

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