You probably have noticed the carbon plant storage doesn’t last that long—at least not as we thought it did. In fact, it was only recently that a study rocked our understanding of how nature mitigated climate change. According to research led by Dr. Heather Graven from Imperial College London, it established that plants absorb CO2 at higher rates than it was previously believed, but here comes the bombshell: they don’t hold onto it for long.
So what’s the big deal? Let’s dive in.
“For decades now, many of us have been counting on forests and other areas that are packed with plants to suck up CO2 from the atmosphere, well, lock it away. Literally, that’s how we thought it worked: plants grow; they suck in CO2; that CO2 just stays there, trapped in their tissues, unable to contribute to that stockpile of warming agents hovering over the planet. This new research complicates things a bit.”.
Plants around the world, he says, “are actually more productive than we thought they were.” That would mean they are taking in more CO2, frankly, than we thought. Good news, right? Not at all. That gets back into the atmosphere sooner than we have estimated. So that makes this period of carbon storage much shorter than was supposed, which really complicates a lot of our strategies for how we’re going to fight climate change.
It has meant betting by governments and corporations in the hope that we can offset our CO2 to great extents through reforestation and other plantings. This means, according to Dr. Graven, “Carbon stored in living plants doesn’t stay there as long as we thought.” It drives home the low potential of nature-based carbon removal projects and that it is really the fossil fuel emissions that should be ramped down quickly to lessen the impacts of climate change.
In other words, the tree-planting projects and all the other nature-based solutions remain very significant, just not that silver bullet many people had been expecting.
What was most amazing about this research was that researchers used radiocarbon from nuclear bomb tests in the 1950s and 1960s to actually trace carbon movement. This innovation brought with it data on the speed of carbon cycling through the biosphere. So to speak, the sum of all ecosystems of the Earth. Models like this somehow underestimate the rate at which plants grow and absorb CO2 but overestimate the time carbon was locked up in them.
“The plants were growing at the time was faster than current climate models estimate that it was. Carbon cycles more rapidly between atmosphere and biosphere than we have thought,” said Dr. Charles Koven, the co-author of the research from Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.
In other words—carbon doesn’t stay where we thought it did for as long. And maybe more importantly: it means that plants are really good at yanking CO2 out of the air, but they’re more promiscuous about letting it go, as well. This difference becomes critical to refining models of climate disequilibrium, which have been built early and incorrect carbon cycling theories.
One of this study’s authors, Dr. Will Wieder, is from the National Center for Atmospheric Research: he commented mostly on the importance of these findings for future climate projections: “The improved estimates of historical land carbon uptake are necessary for policymakers and scientists to project this crucial ecosystem service in upcoming decades.”
Perhaps the most charitable way one might put this is that this new knowledge represents an approach to re-thinking our attitude towards climate change. Undeniably, the sinking of carbon dioxide by plants plays a key role, but not something that can provide an absolute answer by itself. What we require today is that these adoptions are to be brought in a multidimensional way, commencing from the reduction of emissions from the use of fossil fuel up to innovative technologies for capture and storage of carbon.
So, what does this mean for you? If you truly stand up against climate change and have proven to care about the planet, you wouldn’t stop at the trees. What it does mean is action toward policies that effectively cut emissions at their source as well as technology that better captures and stores more carbon. Be aware that everything shall count, from lesser carbon feet to sharing awareness of how we can solve the climate problem overall.
“The carbon’s in the living vegetation isn’t going to be stored there as long as we previously estimated.” The concept that we are able to put even more carbon into the biosphere than is naturally happening seems very much a fallacy.
In other words, we have to do just a little better for ourselves while our leafy friends are trying very gallantly to bail us out. The future of our planet really does depend on it.
