{"id":8206,"date":"2021-12-08T17:49:52","date_gmt":"2021-12-08T21:49:52","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.edf.org\/edfish\/?p=8206"},"modified":"2021-12-09T14:49:54","modified_gmt":"2021-12-09T18:49:54","slug":"natural-climate-solutions-cut-a-steady-course-through-a-sea-of-proposals-for-ocean-carbon-dioxide-reduction","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.edf.org\/edfish\/2021\/12\/08\/natural-climate-solutions-cut-a-steady-course-through-a-sea-of-proposals-for-ocean-carbon-dioxide-reduction\/","title":{"rendered":"Natural climate solutions cut a steady course through a sea of proposals for ocean carbon dioxide reduction"},"content":{"rendered":"

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When it comes to slowing the warming of our planet, there is no substitute for immediate, dramatic reductions in anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions. But emissions reductions alone won\u2019t be enough to limit warming to the 1.5 degrees Celsius goal at the heart of the 2015 Paris Agreement, or even to the Agreement\u2019s upper limit of 2 degrees Celsius. In fact, we\u2019ll almost certainly need to complement emissions reductions with big investments in carbon dioxide removal, or CDR, to capture and lock away some of the carbon dioxide we\u2019ve already emitted.<\/p>\n

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A comprehensive new report<\/a> released today by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, or NASEM, provides some insight into the sequestration potential, ecological risks and, in many instances, significant scientific uncertainties that surround ocean-based pathways to remove carbon dioxide. These ocean CDR approaches differ widely in their potential scale, the aspects of the ocean system they are designed to manipulate or restore and \u2014 most consequentially \u2014 the degree to which they rely on human intervention in the ocean system.<\/p>\n

Understanding carbon sequestration<\/strong><\/p>\n

Scientists call the process of capturing and then locking away all this carbon sequestration <\/em>\u2014 and we\u2019re going to need quite a bit of it. Although there is some disagreement over the amount of carbon dioxide we need to sequester, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change<\/a> and several recent studies that evaluated the effects of climate policy choices have all concluded that carbon dioxide reduction must be a part of our efforts to avoid catastrophic climate change. Furthermore, they found that we only have about ten years to pull this off.<\/p>\n

Carbon dioxide reduction approaches range from highly engineered, technological solutions, such as direct air capture, to an array of proposed natural climate solutions<\/a>, such as storage of carbon in agricultural soils, revegetation of tropical forests and restoration of coastal ecosystems, including mangroves and salt marshes.<\/p>\n

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While most attention on carbon dioxide reduction has focused on carbon storage pathways based on land and our coasts, many technological and natural solutions have also been proposed for the open ocean. The oceans have already helped us avoid even more extreme warming by absorbing nearly a quarter of all the carbon dioxide humanity has emitted since 1850. And the oceans may yet help us capture and store additional carbon dioxide from the atmosphere if we can safely restore or accelerate the oceans\u2019 carbon dioxide absorption pathways.<\/p>\n

Considering ocean-based natural climate solutions<\/strong><\/p>\n

In contrast to engineered solutions that generally focus exclusively on maximizing carbon capture and storage, natural climate solutions aim to sequester carbon by protecting, managing or restoring ecosystems while avoiding new greenhouse gas emissions. Potential ocean-based natural climate solutions include:<\/p>\n