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Your Ecological House™—The Return of Nature
— George Monbiot, Natural Climate Solutions Advocate
Sometimes everything just comes together. In recent months, I have written a great deal about two related problems, “legacy carbon” and “climate migration,” which begins with the abandonment of uninhabitable or economically indefensible regions. By legacy carbon, I mean the excess carbon dioxide we’ve already released into the atmosphere that will continue to push global temperatures higher even if we cut all new emissions immediately.
Regions and locales subject to abandonment in the coming decades due to legacy carbon’s effects include areas threatened by sea-level rise such as coastal lowlands and most of southern Florida, inland areas vulnerable to flooding such as wetlands and regions susceptible to wildfires and/or prone to drought. In other words, most of North America.
To mitigate or adapt to these disruptive developments, we must address two issues: first, obviously, we must reduce emissions by around 50 percent by 2035 and nearly 100 percent by 2050. If we don’t, we will have no choice but to abandon those areas that currently are only at risk. But assuming we manage to pull that particular rabbit out of a hat, we are still faced with the legacy carbon problem and ensuing climate chaos.
How should we go about sequestering excess atmospheric carbon?
Unfortunately, most of the current proposals—with their high-tech, highfinance approach to the problem—won’t do the job. While some machines have been developed that can extract CO2, they face serious economic challenges but, more importantly, they simply cannot be deployed quickly enough to avert disaster.
Climeworks of Switzerland, one the few companies that manufactures atmospheric carbon removal equipment, claims that each of their two existing machines captures the annual emissions from 200 cars. The company says it would need to build 250,000 such units to capture just one percent of our current emissions.
An alternate proposal of growing biofuels that would capture carbon that could be resold as fuels is also limited by scaling, but in a different way. Growing enough biofuel to meet carbon sequestration demands could double the world’s use of fertilizers while reducing the amount of arable land available for growing food by as much as 50 percent.
Enter Natural Climate Solutions (NCS), a new set of proposals underwritten by a diverse group of climate experts and activists. (Supporters include many of the “heavy hitters” of the international climate movement such as activist Bill McKibben, climate scientist Michael Mann, environmental author George Monbiot and young Nobel nominee Greta Thunberg.) Reduced to its essence, the idea of NCS is to let nature do the work of sequestering atmospheric carbon.
By restoring natural ecosystems—or helping them restore themselves—we can sequester and store enormous amounts of carbon, while at the same time helping to mitigate one of the other great crises facing the planet, its sixth mass extinction.* (Talk about things coming together!)
And it turns out that some of the same natural habitats that we need to retreat from—coastal zones, wetlands and peat marshes—are the most efficient carbon capture and storage “machines” on the planet. For example, coastal ecosystems can capture carbon 40 times faster than tropical forests. It is estimated that, by implementing a global NCS program we can immediately provide as much as 37 percent of the carbon sequestration required to ensure stabilizing global temperature below the 2ºC “fail safe” level—and, properly managed, natural ecosystems will quickly add more storage capacity. Finally, we can implement NCS for a fraction of the cost of any other carbon sequestration proposal.
We’ll take a good look at NCS in upcoming columns, because the restoration of nature is our best bet for saving our ecological house.
© Philip S. Wenz, 2021 Philip S. (Skip) Wenz is the author of the E-book Your Ecological House, available at all major electronic book distributors.
* Note: the Cape Fear’s Going Green Environmental Book Club will read Elizabeth Kolbert’s book The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History in order to discuss it at the October 12, 2021 club meeting. See page 23 for details.
