Australian climate scientists call for soil carbon storage through land management

Australian climate scientists are calling for soil carbon sequestration to be incorporated into the urgent fight against climate change, noting that new methods of land management may be necessary.

When Samantha Grover began her career as a soil scientist, she says climate change was not widely viewed as a serious global threat.

In the two decades since, the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology University senior lecturer has seen those attitudes change as sea levels rise and extreme weather events become more frequent following a one-degree increase in the Earth's average temperature since 1900.

Current popular strategies to help combat excessive greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, like capturing and storing the carbon emissions from biofuel-burning power plants or planting new forests to absorb carbon are costly. If used on a scale large enough to be effective, these approaches would be prohibitively expensive or require too much land, water, or energy.

According to Grover, however, soil sequestration is a cheaper and relatively natural way of removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere with fewer impacts on land and water. The basis of the idea lies in implementing better land management and agricultural practices to enhance the ability of soils to store carbon.

"There is more carbon in our soils than there is in the atmosphere, and we can change how much carbon there is in soils by using plants, right? It's not high-tech, it is not magic, but it is a really different way of thinking about managing land," said the climate scientist.

Currently, soils remove about 25 percent of the world's fossil fuel emissions each year. Most soil carbon is stored as permafrost and peat in Arctic areas, while soils in hot or dry areas store less carbon. Despite its usefulness in this regard, Antarctica is not spared from the impacts of climate change.

"Since 2016, Antarctic sea ice has really declined dramatically. It has stayed low since 2016 and we've had repeated record summer minimums in sea ice and then this year sea ice was off-the-charts low around Antarctica," said Ariaan Purich, lecturer in climate science at the Monash University.

While melting sea ice and its threat to beloved wildlife have helped bring the problem of climate change to the forefront of public consciousness, the international community has been reluctant to take real actions to reverse the deteriorating trend.

"We've known what the science is, but our action has been too slow, and so it is really frustrating as a climate scientist to see this. We put out the warnings and society globally hasn't acted fast enough," said Purich.

Though the inaction has been adding pressure to the efforts in battling climate change, Grover said she remains optimistic about the mission thanks to civilian organizations and agricultural practitioners who have taken the initiative to implement soil improvement methods.

"My optimism comes from the fear, the grief and the mobilization to action of the general public, and also really comes from farmers, from the landholders that I've had the opportunity to work with or view their work, who are just doing it," she said.

(Cover image via CFP)