Quick Key Facts

• Blue carbon is the term for carbon that is captured by the world’s ocean and coastal ecosystems. Through sequestration, it can reduce greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.
• Coastal blue carbon is the carbon captured by living coastal and marine organisms and stored in coastal ecosystems through salt marshes, mangroves, and seagrass beds which both sequester and store carbon. 
• Mangroves and salt marshes remove carbon from the atmosphere at a rate 10 times greater than tropical forests, and store three to five times more carbon per acre.
• Seagrass meadows account for just 0.1% of the world’s seafloor but store 11% of the organic carbon buried in the ocean.
• Giant kelp also locks away vast amounts of CO2 in ocean sediments.
• While these habitats can contribute to climate change mitigation, if they are destroyed or lost then carbon can be released back into the atmosphere. Currently, coastal habitats around the world are being lost at a rapid rate, largely due to coastal development for housing, ports, and commercial facilities.
• There are currently various efforts underway to protect and restore these ecosystems.  
• The U.S. was the first nation to include blue carbon in its national greenhouse gas emissions inventory to incentivize restoration efforts through carbon-trading financial markets.

What Is Blue Carbon?

Carbon dioxide is one of the leading greenhouse gas emissions causing climate change, with human activities like the extraction and burning of fossil fuels having raised the atmosphere’s CO2 content by 50% in under 200 years, according to scientists at NOAA. 

As many look for solutions to sequester more carbon, studies have shown that one of the best carbon sinks we have is in the ocean, particularly coastal ecosystems. 

In 2009, the term “blue carbon” was coined in a UN report to encompass these ecosystems’ large contribution to global carbon sequestration. Now that it has gained more traction globally, international agreements about climate change focus more on the possibilities of coastal blue carbon and its ability to help curb climate change.

Blue Carbon and the Environment

According to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, carbon dioxide accounts for 76% of greenhouse gas emissions, 65% of which comes from the burning of fossil fuels and industrial processes. Since the middle of the 20th century, annual emissions from burning fossil fuels have increased from close to 11 billion tons of carbon dioxide per year in the 1960s to an estimated 36.6 billion tons in 2022.

While playing a vital role in living organisms and ecosystems, as well as regulating the Earth’s temperature that makes life on Earth possible, carbon dioxide emissions generated by humans have been altering the chemistry of the global temperature.   

The ocean absorbs around 30% of the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. As it increases in the atmosphere from human activity and changing land use, like deforestation, the amount of carbon dioxide absorbed by the seawater also increases, which leads to ocean acidification.

Ocean acidification, which is sometimes referred to as the “osteoporosis of the sea,” is when carbon dioxide dissolves in seawater as carbonic acid, which threatens the chemical balance of the water and makes it difficult for marine life to build shells and skeletons. It also causes harmful algal species to produce more toxins that could be harmful to humans.

Marine ecosystems, such as blue carbon, can help contribute to climate change mitigation and ocean acidification by sequestering excess carbon from the atmosphere. 

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) focuses on rooted vegetation in the coastal zones such as mangroves, tidal marshes and seagrasses, which have high carbon burial rates, and accumulate carbon in their soils and sediments. They also provide other benefits like storm protection, water quality improvement, and benefiting biodiversity and fisheries. 

Mangroves, salt marshes, and seagrasses are found along the coastlines of every continent except Antarctica.

One of the roadblocks happens when blue carbon ecosystems are damaged or destroyed, causing the carbon they’ve been storing over long periods of time to be released into the atmosphere. This damage comes from pollution, development, overexploitation of resources, recreational activities, and other sources.

Luckily, there are several initiatives working to restore these ecosystems.

Mangroves

Mangroves are tropical shrubs and trees that grow mainly in coastal salty waters and can tolerate being partly submerged in tides, thriving in low-oxygen, high saline environments. 

Mangroves not only provide critical marine habitat, but mangrove forests serve as natural buffers against storm surges, benefit shellfish and fish, provide wood and construction material, hold traditional medicine, and carry spiritual and cultural value for many coastal communities.

Mangroves also hold as much carbon as the annual emissions of 90,000 cars in one square mile.   

Mangrove forests can be found on the coasts of more than 100 tropical and subtropical countries, totaling more than 54,000 square miles.

According to researchers, in 2014 mangroves mitigated greater than 1% of national fossil fuel emissions for countries such as Bangladesh, Colombia and Nigeria.

However, mangroves are being lost at a rate of 1-2% per year. Experts estimate that carbon emissions from mangrove deforestation account for up to 10% of emissions from deforestation globally, despite covering just 0.7% of land coverage.

One of the main drivers for mangrove loss is also aquaculture production leading to large-scale conversions of mangroves areas into fish and shrimp ponds.

A study conducted by a team of scientists at Global Mangrove Watch, who analyzed changes in mangrove ecosystems in the world from 1996-2010, found 38% of mangrove forests observed in the study are affected by human activity in Southeast Asia. The area is home to 33.8% of the world’s mangroves, as well as 90% of the world’s aquaculture, making it the worst affected region.

This led many coastal communities who rely on them for their economic livelihoods through fishing and timber, as well as disaster mitigation, to figure out how to balance aquaculture with conservation efforts. 

According to Eco Business, people in North Sumatra conserve mangroves at the center of their shrimp farms and plant oil palm along the borders.

Seagrass

Seventy-two different species of seagrass exist submerged in shallow waters around the world.  

Integral to marine biodiversity, seagrass absorbs harmful nutrients, works as an acidification buffer, protects coastal areas from storms, and hosts an array of sealife, 20% of which contributes to the world’s fisheries. 

Despite covering only 1% of the ocean floor, seagrass meadows are effective carbon sinks storing up to 18% of the ocean’s carbon. 

Seagrass is also one of the least protected coastal ecosystems, with only 26% of recorded meadows falling within marine protected areas. Since the 1930s, 30% have been lost globally with an estimated 7% disappearing every year due to threats such as urban, industrial, and agricultural run-off, dredging, coastal development, unregulated boating and fishing, as well as climate change. 

Salt Marshes

Salt marshes are coastal wetlands that are flooded and drained by saltwater brought in by the changing tides. They are made of deep mud and peat, which is composed of decomposing plant matter. They occur worldwide along shorelines and provide food, refuge, and nursery habitat for more than 75% of fisheries, and also protect shorelines from erosion, flooding through absorption, and protect water quality by filtering runoff. They also provide habitats for native birds and migratory fish.

Salt marshes can sequester approximately 1,940 pounds of carbon per acre per year. However, according to a study published in Nature, between the years 2000 and 2019, 561 square miles of salt marshes were lost globally, resulting in 16.3 million metric tons of carbon emissions.

Besides the losses contributing to climate change, climate change is one of the greatest threats to salt marshes. Other threats are coastal erosion, mangrove encroachment, invasive species, and eutrophication, which involves excessive nutrients that cause harmful algal blooms toxic to humans, fish, and seagrass in fish habitats and are a result of runoff from agriculture fertilizer, sewage, industrial waste, the livestock industry, and aquaculture. 

Another reason for loss is conversion to development. Historically people viewed marshes as unimportant wastelands, and converted that land into construction sites and farmland. 

A study by Humboldt University in California found 481 salt marshes in Humboldt Bay in the City of Arcata, and concluded after analyzing more than 1800 maps over time that around 1400 acres of salt marshes were lost due to diking and land conversion for agricultural purposes. The current lot of salt marshes sequestered 396 metric tons of carbon per year, but the study determined that if lands were to be restored back to salt marshes, around 1170 metric tons would be sequestered annually. 

Kelp Forests

Kelp forests in the ocean are also able to capture and sequester carbon, and at a rate that is said to be faster than land forests.

Kelp is a type of brown algae, or seaweed, that through photosynthesis absorbs carbon dioxide. When it dies, most of what was stored is locked up in its tissues and transported to the ocean floor. A study reported that Australia’s Great Southern Reef sequesters 30% of all of Australia’s blue carbon, and 3% globally. According to another report from the BBC, seaweed on the whole is said to sequester nearly 200 million tons of carbon dioxide a year. 

Kelp forests are also at risk because of the climate crisis, overfishing, invasions of hungry sea urchins, and pollution. However, much like the above coastal ecosystems, restoration efforts are underway. 

Blue Carbon Conservation and Restoration Efforts

While some of those statistics are grim, there are efforts happening globally to conserve and restore many of these ecosystems. Here are some of them:

The Blue Carbon Initiative

An organization comprised of Conservation International, the International Union for Conservation of Nature, and the Intergovernmental Oceanographic Commission of UNESCO, they have developed projects in Indonesia and Australia and seek to build a foundation of knowledge about these ecosystems through the Blue Carbon Scientific Working Group. 

Through the Initiative, they’ve been working with partners from national governments, research institutions, nongovernmental organizations, and coastal communities around the world to provide global and national policy expertise to enable more initiatives.

Action Aid

Through the campaign She is the Answer, this international NGO aids communities’ resilience to climate change through empowering local women. They created a mangrove rewilding project in Kampot, Cambodia, with the goal of planting more than 100,000 mangrove saplings along the shoreline. The women have also set up climate-adaptive floating gardens and schools where younger generations can learn about climate change and resilience. 

The Mangrove Restoration Project

Nigeria is the location of the most degraded mangroves globally. In 2020, the government launched this community-led project aiming to increase mangroves by 25%. 

Great Meadows Marsh Project

This project is restoring nearly 40 acres of salt marshes and other coastal habitats at the Great Meadow marsh in Stewart B. McKinney National Wildlife Refuge in Connecticut. The project is led by NOAA and its partners.

South Bay Salt Pond Restoration Project

The largest wetland restoration project on the West Coast, this San Francisco project will restore more than 15,000 acres of industrial salt ponds into tidal wetlands. Launched in 2003 as a 50-year project, it has made considerable progress with more than 3000 acres restored so far. 

The Seagrass Restoration Project

For the last twenty years, the Virginia Institute of Marine Sciences and The Nature Conservancy successfully created 3612 hectares of new seagrass beds by planting 70 million seeds of eelgrass off of Virginia’s Eastern Shore. 

Blue Carbon and the Carbon Environment

In 2021, blue carbon emerged as part of the controversial carbon market, where companies or individuals offset their own emissions by paying another company or organization that works to reduce the total amount of carbon produced in the world. These carbon offsets are traded through international brokers, retailers and trading platforms. 

It remains controversial for a variety of reasons, one of which is that while some believe this improves the environment, others claim it does not tackle the root cause. Some also say it leads to greenwashing. 

Verra, a Washington, DC-based nonprofit that regulates the carbon market, recently credited a current project to reforest and conserve a mangrove swamp in Sinaloa, Mexico. It estimates that the project reduces 3,123,863 tons of atmospheric carbon each year through planting new trees and the maintenance of existing plants. 

More controversy surrounds existing vegetation being part of the carbon offset process and giving credits for projects that aren’t in danger of destruction. For example, the Nature Conservancy has helped develop several projects that generate credits for corporations like Walt Disney and J.P. Morgan, where trees that are protected are not in danger of deforestation. 

Verra was also recently investigated by The Guardian, which found that 90% of their rainforest carbon offsets were “worthless” and that only a handful showed evidence of deforestation reduction, with further analysis indicating that 94% of the credits had no benefit to the climate. 

Still some are benefiting with projects that are working, like coastal village communities in Kenya who are the first blue carbon credit initiative in the world to enhance communities, according to the UN. 

Mikoko Pamoja is a small-scale carbon offset facility that seeks to provide incentives for mangrove restoration; promote conservation and sustainability; mitigate climate change; conserve biodiversity; and enhance community livelihood. The project conserves 117 hectares of mangroves and over three years has restored 8000 mangroves with the help of local community, government institutions, local schools, and volunteers. 

Policy

While the U.S. Congress passed the Coastal Zones Act in 1972 – which was designed to help protect  wetlands, floodplains, estuaries, beaches, dunes, barrier islands, and coral reefs, as well as the fish and wildlife using those habitats – and states like Texas passed legal protections for seagrass, it appears blue carbon-specific large scale policy is necessary. 

However, policy frameworks have been started in some places globally.

The UN’s International Union for Conservation of Nature released a policy framework for blue carbon ecosystems with a goal to align across global policy processes to enhance, restore, and sustain these ecosystems. 

In September 2022, the Global Mangrove Alliance released a report which was created in collaboration with more than 100 mangrove science, finance, and policy experts from around the world to set out a pathway for the way ahead to finance more mangrove action.

Other countries have committed to making changes. 

At 2021’s COP26 climate conference, Belize announced it would double the area of protected mangroves, halt net loss of coastal wetland habitat by 2025, and restore 4000 hectares by 2030. Costa Rica committed to protecting all of its coastal wetlands by 2025, and the Seychelles has committed to completely protecting its mangroves and seagrasses by 2030.  

The government of Indonesia has also been working to protect mangroves by introducing spatial plans, a system for resolving land use conflicts and balancing environmental and economic considerations by creating zones for specific uses. The country also made substantial progress in expanding Marine Protected Areas to more than 23 million hectares. Indonesias has also set an ambitious target of rehabilitating 600,000 hectares of mangroves by 2024. 

Takeaway

While systemic changes are needed throughout industries that contribute to atmospheric carbon dioxide, coastal ecosystems offer many benefits for climate change mitigation. 

Though there have been significant losses to these habitats over the years, mostly due to human activity, more restoration efforts are underway, which will not only benefit the environment in terms of carbon sequestration, but also help restore biodiversity and enhance communities.

The post Blue Carbon 101: Everything You Need to Know appeared first on EcoWatch.

According to a new study, life on our planet is “under siege” from humans and its “vital signs” have been pushed to the limit.

As wildfires rage and record temperatures cause everything from coral bleaching to widespread drought and water shortages, the international team of scientists who declared a climate emergency back in 2019 have said that 20 out of 35 of the planet’s vital signs are being pushed to the edge, reported The Independent.

“As scientists, we are increasingly being asked to tell the public the truth about the crises we face in simple and direct terms. The truth is that we are shocked by the ferocity of the extreme weather events in 2023. We are afraid of the uncharted territory that we have now entered. Conditions are going to get very distressing and potentially unmanageable for large regions of the world, with the 2.6°C warming expected over the course of the century, even if the self-proposed national emissions reduction commitments of the Paris Agreement are met,” the authors of the study wrote.

The scientists pointed out that this year has seen records for air and sea surface temperatures, as well as Antarctic sea ice extent, broken by wide margins.

The Canadian wildfires released a gigaton of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, nearly twice the country’s total greenhouse gas emissions for 2021, The Independent reported.

“Without actions that address the root problem of humanity taking more from Earth than it can safely give, we’re on our way to the potential collapse of natural and socioeconomic systems and a world with unbearable heat and shortages of food and freshwater,” said Dr. Christopher Wolf, lead author of the report who is formerly of Oregon State University and now a researcher with Terrestrial Ecosystems, as reported by The Guardian.

In the study, the researchers encouraged transitioning to a global economy that reduces the excessive emissions and overconsumption of the wealthy and prioritizes human well-being.

“To address the overexploitation of our planet, we challenge the prevailing notion of endless growth and overconsumption by rich countries and individuals as unsustainable and unjust,” the authors wrote in the study. “Instead, we advocate for reducing resource overconsumption… in a more circular economy; and prioritizing human flourishing and sustainability. We emphasize climate justice and fair distribution of the costs and benefits of climate action, particularly for vulnerable communities. We call for a transformation of the global economy to prioritize human well-being and to provide for a more equitable distribution of resources.”

The study, “The 2023 state of the climate report: Entering uncharted territory,” was published in the journal Nature Climate Change.

The planet’s “vital signs” being pushed to the limit include loss of glaciers and sea ice, extreme flooding, rising ocean and air temperatures, biodiversity loss, fossil fuel use and greenhouse gases accumulating in the atmosphere.

The researchers said that, as climate change progresses, the worldwide breakdown of society was “feasible and dangerously underexplored.”

“Life on planet Earth is under siege. We are now in an uncharted territory. For several decades, scientists have consistently warned of a future marked by extreme climatic conditions because of escalating global temperatures caused by ongoing human activities that release harmful greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. Unfortunately, time is up,” the study’s authors wrote. “We are entering an unfamiliar domain regarding our climate crisis, a situation no one has ever witnessed firsthand in the history of humanity.”

The authors noted that fossil fuel subsidies, rather than lessening after the COVID-19 pandemic, have increased by 107 percent, from $531 billion in 2021 to $1,097 billion last year due to the rising cost of energy.

This year has seen 38 days of the global average temperature in excess of 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels.

“The frequency and severity of those disasters might be outpacing rising temperatures. By the end of the 21st century, as many as three to six billion people may find themselves outside the Earth’s liveable regions, meaning they will be encountering severe heat, limited food availability and elevated mortality rates,” Wolf said, as The Independent reported.

The researchers are calling for a transition to plant-based diets, the phasing out of subsidies for fossil fuels, the adoption of fossil fuel non-proliferation treaties, the elimination of coal and increased protection of forests.

“A shift toward plant-based diets, particularly in wealthy countries, could improve global food security and help mitigate climate change,” the study said.

The authors emphasized that less wealthy nations that have produced far fewer emissions will be most affected by climate impacts, including climate-related disasters and malnourishment.

“These record extremes are alarming in themselves, and they are also in danger of triggering tipping points that could do irreversible damage and further accelerate climate change,” said co-author of the study professor Tim Lenton, who is climate change and Earth system science chair at the University of Exeter, as reported by The Guardian. “Our best hope to prevent a cascade of climate tipping points is to identify and trigger positive tipping points in our societies and economies, to ensure a rapid and just transition to a sustainable future.”

The post ‘Uncharted Territory’: Human Activity Pushing 20 of Earth’s 35 Vital Signs to the Limit, Scientists Warn appeared first on EcoWatch.

For more than 100 million years, trees have dropped their leaves every fall, creating a protective layer of duff that provides cover for snails, bees, and butterflies. Decaying leaves fertilized the soil and gave nutrients back to the trees. Today, fallen leaves still provide a harvest festival of benefits — unless they get blasted into oblivion with a leaf blower.

Across the United States, some 11 million leaf blowers roar into action every year, obliterating delicate debris with 200-mile-per-hour winds. Their distinctive, whining drone has been hard to escape. But restrictions on leaf blowers have been spreading across the country, permitting some lucky locales to experience the season as nature intended, at a humane decibel level. 

Outright bans on the gas-powered machines have recently taken effect in Washington, D.C.; Miami Beach, Florida; and Evanston, Illinois. California will end the sale of gas-powered blowers next summer. Their hum will also be silenced in Portland and Seattle in the coming years. Barring a sudden acceptance of lawns scattered with leaves, rakes and battery-powered devices will slowly replace them. 

Long the dream of noise-sensitive people everywhere, bans started taking off after pandemic lockdowns in 2020 forced office workers into their homes. Stuck in their neighborhoods all day, people discovered the beauty of birdsong, along with a newfound loathing for the whine of the leaf blowers. 

Communities that had tried and failed to get restrictions on the devices are now starting to see success, said Jamie Banks, the co-founder and president of Quiet Communities, a nonprofit dedicated to reducing noise pollution: “There’s a lot more consensus around doing something about it.” Today, more than 200 towns across the United States have restrictions on leaf blowers in place, though many just put limits on what hours or times of year people can operate them. 

Another factor behind the spread of bans is research showing that leaf blowers emit a shocking amount of air pollution. The California Air Resources Board has estimated that operating a gas-powered leaf blower for an hour emits as much smog-forming polluting as driving a Toyota Camry from Los Angeles to Denver. How is that even possible? Many leaf blowers use a wildly inefficient “two-stroke” engine, which mixes oil and gasoline and spits out as much as a third of that fuel as unburned aerosol. The outdated design is cheap, powerful, and really loud and dirty.

“I definitely think people underestimate the risks,” said Michael Brauer, a professor of public health at the University of British Columbia. 

A study in 2015 found that lawn mowers, trimmers, leaf blowers, and other lawn equipment accounted for a quarter of all emissions of cancer-causing benzene in 2011, the most data available. They also accounted for 17 percent of volatile organic compounds and 12 percent of nitrogen oxides, the primary pollutants of smog, and were responsible for 20 million tons of planet-warming carbon dioxide emissions — about 4 percent of what passenger cars emitted in 2011.

“The big picture is that cars have gotten cleaner and cleaner and cleaner and cleaner, and this kind of equipment has not,” Brauer said. “And so this has become evident as a more important source of pollution.” Because vehicle regulations have become so strict in California, for example, small, off-road engines like those found in leaf blowers emit more smog-producing emissions than all the 14 million passenger cars in the state. 

Even their noise poses a health concern. Gasoline-powered leaf blowers operate at a low frequency, allowing the noise to carry over long distances and penetrate through walls. “People can’t get away from the sound,” Banks said. “So you go in your house, you close your windows, you shut your doors, and you can still hear it.” 

A study conducted by Banks and the EPA in 2017 found that commonly used lawn equipment was louder than the World Health Organization’s recommended limit of 55 decibels up to 800 feet away. And every 5-decibel increase in the average daily noise level around people’s home leads to a 34 percent increase in heart attacks and strokes, according to Harvard research in 2020.

So why did such a dangerous device take off in the first place? The first leaf blower-like machines, invented in the late 1940s, weren’t intended to blow leaves — they were backpack crop dusters, meant for spraying pesticides. Then someone had the brilliant idea of removing the chemical canister so that all the machine could do was blast away debris. The invention coincided with the development of the suburbs after World War II, when having a carpet of grass around your home became part of the American dream. Fallen leaves were seen as a nuisance that needed removing: They covered up the green lawns everyone wanted to show off and turned sidewalks slippery in the rain. 

So in the 1970s, the Japanese company that had invented the crop duster, Kyoritsu Noki, started selling what the people wanted. Lawn care ballooned into a huge industry, and the backlash soon followed: As early as 1975, Carmel, California, banned the machines outright; by 1999, 20 cities in California had outlawed them, though it took a while for the trend to start spreading to the rest of the country. 

Those bans then set off their own backlash. In 1998, a ban on leaf blowers in Los Angeles neighborhoods sparked a protest, where gardeners, many of them recent immigrants, staged a hunger strike in front of City Hall arguing that the ban was a severe blow to their jobs. Today, the fight to save gas-powered leaf blowers has gotten more organized. In May, Georgia’s Republican Governor Brian Kemp signed a law prohibiting local governments from regulating gas-powered leaf blowers differently from battery-powered ones. It mirrors laws in dozens of states that prevent cities from restricting natural gas hookups in new buildings.

To be sure, swapping gas for electric blowers isn’t as simple as it might sound. Landscapers have adopted a business model that allows them to go from house to house quickly — a job that can drain batteries fast, meaning that some workers need to be swapping batteries out two or three times a shift. “It’s going to take more time for them to do the same job,” Banks said. “So either the customer pays for that extra time, or they relax their aesthetic expectations and say, “OK, just do a cursory cleanup, but we can live with leaves on the ground.” And electric lawn tools still have a long way to go: In California, even with all the bans on gas-powered tools, they make up about 6 percent of the equipment used by lawn care workers.

While battery-powered versions are typically cheaper than gasoline ones, buying new equipment to comply with bans is expensive for landscapers. Some local governments that have adopted bans on gas-powered blowers have also tried to help offset the costs of switching: Ahead of the 2024 ban on the sale of gas-powered leaf blowers, California has set aside $27 million for small landscaping businesses to buy electric equipment; Washington, D.C. introduced a rebate program for the same purpose.

It’s worth noting that the status quo comes at a price for lawn workers, too: They’re subject to the worst of the air and noise pollution from the equipment they’re wielding. “It’s as though you’re sucking the exhaust out of the tailpipe of a car,” Brauer said. “That’s sort of what you’re doing if you’re using a leaf blower.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Hear that? It’s the sound of leaf blower bans. on Oct 25, 2023.

This coverage is made possible through a partnership between Grist and WBEZ, the NPR station in Chicago.

If you wanted to point to a tree that can handle climate change, you might start with the bur oak. 

When the Earth cooled millions of years ago and tropical species started to die off, the oaks which comprise the Quercus genus began diversifying and moving southward. New species emerged and spread across North America, down into Mexico, and in time diversified further — giving rise to the nearly 300 oak species in North America.

A warming planet will reshape the range where oaks will and can grow. As the family of giant trees — at mature height, a bur oak can clear seven-story buildings — lurches northward, a multistate investigation into the future of oak trees and American forests is underway in three sites across Illinois, Minnesota, and Oklahoma. 

Deep inside the Morton Arboretum this fall, a 1,700-acre botanical garden in Chicago’s western suburbs, Andrew Hipp hopped off a golf cart and stepped into a part of the arboretum closed to the public and dedicated to research. 

A senior scientist at the Arboretum, Hipp walked past row after row of young bur oaks. More than 1,000 have been planted here, with a third of the oaks grown from acorns collected from near and around Chicago. The rest of the oaks here are in equal parts from Minnesota and Oklahoma. 

“This study can give us a good idea of how the most foundational species of our forests are going to evolve as conditions change,” Hipp said. “And with the evolution of the oaks with the migration of the oaks, those will shape the composition of the entire forest in our region.”

Back in 2021, and all at the exact same time, bur oak saplings from Illinois, Minnesota, and Oklahoma were also planted in equal proportion in experimental gardens at The University of Minnesota’s Cedar Creek Ecosystem Science Reserve and University of Oklahoma’s Kessler Field Station. 

The goal is to see if different populations of bur oaks perform better in their current environment than in environments within the species’ range but still hundreds of miles away. Scientists want to know how the oaks will respond to different climates, and how that could affect forests in the future. 

“It’s raining right now, as we talk, we all put on a raincoat. Oaks can’t do that. So they have to be able to respond to the climate that they find themselves in,” Hipp said. 

To measure how the oaks respond, the team of scientists planted offspring from a single tree into three states across the oak’s range. The trees from Oklahoma should be adapted to the droughts, and the ones from northern Minnesota should be adapted to freezing conditions. The expectation is that the oaks would do better in their home environments because they have had generations to adjust. 

“If it turns out that oaks are strongly adapted to the local environment, that means they’ve had potentially thousands of years to evolve gene combinations that may prove advantageous in the future as climates change,” Hipp said.

Oaks dominate North American forests — approximately 30 percent of American forests, and their presence is even more pronounced east of the Mississippi, which means that this single group of trees provides a scaffolding critical for a diversity of other life forms. There are more insects, more mammals, more birds, more fungi, and more microorganisms that depend on oaks than practically any other tree genus in North America. 

What happens to oaks, and how they respond to a warming planet, will have profound implications for what humanity does next to preserve them. 

Earlier this year, the Species Survival Commission of the International Union for Conservation of Nature, or IUCN, designated the Morton Arboretum as the Center for Species Survival: Trees. It’s one of 11 research institutions worldwide, with only five in North America. The Morton Arboretum is the first to focus exclusively on the existential predicament of trees worldwide. 

Silvia Alvarez-Clare, the arboretum’s director of global tree conservation, said nearly a third of the more than 400 oak species around the world are at risk of extinction. This experiment could help scientists determine if the oaks need help migrating to preserve climate-adapted genotypes. 

“They may not have time to move through evolutionary time in thousands of years,” said Alvarez-Clare. “It’s all happening so fast that we may have to help them and plant some of them.” 

It’s not just the oaks facing an existential crisis. Alvarez-Claire said that trees writ large are facing extreme endangerment. In 2021, the Botanic Gardens Conservation International’s State of the World’s Trees report found that over 17,000 of the world’s 60,000 tree species are at risk of extinction. Alvarez-Clare said that’s more than all threatened mammals, birds, amphibians, and reptiles put together. 

While the report points to habitat loss, agriculture and commercial logging as the greatest threats to trees worldwide, it stipulates that climate change is increasingly a concern as suitable habitats migrate.

The United States Forest Service has taken notice.

“Trees can move, given enough time,” said Andrew Bowers, the climate adaptation specialist with the office of sustainability and climate for the U.S. Forest Service. “But the pace of current climate change is about 10 times faster than most tree species can migrate.” 

Projects utilizing what scientists call “assisted migration” are already underway at the Forest Service. 

At its core, assisted migration is a plan hatched to move a species or a population from one area to another in anticipation of climate change. Bower said it’s now just one of the “tools in the toolbox” when Forest Service specialists are thinking about reforestation and developing resilient forests.

For example, foresters at the Superior National Forest in northern Minnesota recently completed an assisted migration plan with input from tribal representatives, state and local governments. In the Pacific Northwest, in states like Oregon and Washington, Bowers said that some foresters have been working with Forest Service geneticists to identify seeds from warmer areas for ongoing reforestation projects and to begin to account for climate change.

If trees as resilient as the oak can’t keep apace with climate change, that could mean disaster for the communities of life that depend on them 

Across the three gardens, Jeannine Cavender-Bares, a plant physiological and evolutionary ecologist at the University of Minnesota, said that some overall results are becoming increasingly clear at the drier, hotter southernmost range of the experiment.

“Each population has the highest survival and its home site,” said Cavender-Bares. “It’s just that in Oklahoma, it’s really, really hard for the Minnesota and Illinois population. They’re just not doing well there.”

If the bur oak’s southern range limit is increasingly inhospitable, Cavender-Bares says scientists may need to intercede on the oak’s behalf and speed up migration. She says that could mean transplanting bur oaks from southern climates farther north to share drought-resistant genotype. 

“So in a warming world, how do we maintain healthy forests?” said Cavender-Bares. “We need trees that are adapted, have the right genes, that are adapted to the environments of the future.” 

Back at the arboretum, Hipp turns and inspects a leaf from an Oklahoma bur oak. He says that whether the bur oak will need a helping hand is still very much in the air, but it’s something scientists need to know — and the sooner, the better. 

“The risk of losing these hard-earned gene copies that have evolved over the course of millions of years, inherited by bur oak and evolving within bur oak,” Hipp said. “When we lose those, we’ve lost this opportunity to solve problems that we can’t even predict in the future. So every tree is a warehouse of potential solutions to evolutionary problems.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline To understand the future of forests in the warming world, look to the bur oak on Oct 25, 2023.

The consumption of meat and dairy products puts an enormous strain on the planet. Replacing forests with grasslands for grazing cattle and growing grain used for their feed means releasing stored carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, contributing to climate change. And cow burps release methane, the second most prevalent greenhouse gas, which has a greater warming effect than carbon dioxide.

A new study has found that replacing half the chicken, beef, pork and milk products consumed by humans with plant-based alternatives has the potential to reduce agricultural greenhouse gas emissions, as well as related land use, by almost one-third. The reduction would also effectively stop forest loss.

“Plant-based meats are not just a novel food product but a critical opportunity for achieving food security and climate goals while also achieving health and biodiversity objectives worldwide,” said study co-author Eva Wollenberg, an anthropologist and natural resource management specialist with the Gund Institute for Environment at the University of Vermont, as AFP reported.

Global demand for animal products is set to increase due to higher incomes and population growth, which could lead to detrimental consequences for the environment.

“Higher meat demand is usually associated with higher incomes and dietary shifts related to urbanization, which favor proteins from animal sources in diets,” Marta Kozicka, an agricultural economist and research scholar with the Integrated Biosphere Futures Research Group at the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis near Vienna, Austria, told EcoWatch in an email.

The study, “Feeding climate and biodiversity goals with novel plant-based meat and milk alternatives,” was published in the journal Nature Communications.

Using modeling, the researchers looked at the results of a global dietary move toward plant-based alternatives to chicken, beef, pork and milk with comparable nutritional value, reported AFP.

“We based our analysis on the Global Biosphere Management Model (GLOBIOM), an economic partial equilibrium model that integrates global agriculture, bioenergy, and forestry sectors. It is a powerful tool that allows for exploration of future scenarios for food and agricultural systems,” Kozicka told EcoWatch.

The results suggested that reducing consumption of meat and dairy by 50 percent could lead to greenhouse gas emissions from land use and agriculture being reduced by 31 percent by 2050, as compared to 2020 levels.

If that were to happen, instead of continuing to expand, agricultural land use would be reduced by 12 percent. In addition, areas of natural land and forests would stay at about the same level as they were in 2020.

Nitrogen used for crops would be cut nearly in half as compared to current projections, and water use would be reduced by 10 percent.

But how realistic is it to expect people around the world to reduce their meat and dairy consumption by half?

“We argue that achieving up to 50% substitution by 2050 is realistic, especially if we consider replacement of the animal products not only with the novel plant-based alternatives, but also with traditional plant-based products, such as tofu, and other novel meat substitutes, whether cell-based or insect-based,” Kozicka said.

One of the main considerations for consumers thinking about replacing some of the meat and dairy they eat with plant-based alternatives is cost, Kozicka explained.

“A major factor that will determine how the novel plant-based alternatives’ markets evolve is the price of the products, as currently they are generally more expensive than their animal sourced analogues. In this process, policies and regulations, as well as the market development (how good the products are, what is their price) could all play a role,” Kozicka told EcoWatch.

Access to affordable, healthy alternative foods is another issue that needs to be addressed.

“According to the FAO ‘The State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World 2023,’ more than 3.1 billion people in the world – or 42 percent – were unable to afford a healthy diet in 2021, representing an increase of 134 million people compared to 2019, before the pandemic,” Kozicka said. “This reflects the increase in the cost of a healthy diet that, in many countries, occurred in combination with a decline in disposable income.”

Kozicka added that, according to studies, healthy and sustainable diets were significantly less expensive in countries that had upper-middle to high incomes, but more expensive in lower-middle to low-income countries.

“This is why it is so important to improve the availability and accessibility of foods that constitute these diets,” Kozicka told EcoWatch.

A shift toward plant-based alternatives would improve food security around the world, according to the study, as there would be 31 million fewer people facing malnutrition by mid-century.

Biodiversity would be enhanced as well, with the land area being restored making up from 13 to 25 percent of the approximate land restoration necessary to meet the 30-by-30 goal to conserve 30 percent of marine and land habitat around the world by 2030.

“Plant-based foods require much less land than their animal-source equivalents. As a result, deforestation and conversion of other natural land into agricultural land could be significantly reduced, or even stopped thanks to this dietary change. This would reduce biodiversity loss. Furthermore, in our study we considered an additional measure to restore the agricultural land spared from livestock and feed production within forest biomes through afforestation with biodiversity-friendly management. This would restore some of the biodiversity that had been lost,” Kozicka said.

The greatest reductions in biodiversity loss would be in sub-Saharan Africa, Southeast Asia and China. Carbon sequestration would see the biggest improvements in South America — primarily Brazil — and sub-Saharan Africa.

The study also suggested that ecosystem decline would be cut in half by 2050.

Just replacing beef with plant-based alternatives would result in about half the reductions in emissions of all four animal products combined.

The researchers said small-scale farmers who rely on livestock should be taken into consideration, but pointed out that climate change presented a substantial risk to their livelihoods.

“Importantly, the changes need to happen across the food system, that is, measures to shift demand towards healthy and sustainable diets need to be accompanied by interventions to ensure availability and accessibility of nutritious plant-based foods. This will require, among others, sustainable intensification of agricultural production, support for farmers and other stakeholders that might be negatively affected by the transition, as well as additional environmental measures that will ensure achievement of the maximum environmental benefits,” Kozicka told EcoWatch.

Kozicka said that a transition to more plant-based food choices is one of the essential changes necessary for a healthy future free of fossil fuels.

“Different studies show that sustainable diets will be an important component of a larger bundle of measures taken to meet climate change mitigation targets. Importantly, predominantly plant-based diets are good not only for the planet, but also for our health,” Kozicka said.

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