Agriculture is multi-functional, producing economic goods including food, feed, fibre, and fuel, as well as providing several intangible or non-tradable services to society free of cost. Non-tradable services, unlike economic goods, remain unpriced; as a result, farmers are not compensated monetarily for the benefits of the several non-tradable services they …
In tackling climate change, policy makers often overlook the role of the natural world in regulating greenhouse gases in the atmosphere: specifically, the unique role that forests and peatlands have to play in the battle against rising emissions. Changing approach would significantly reduce the cost of tackling climate change and …
Climate change poses a threat to all ecosystems. In the case of the wetland ecosystem, not only will the water bodies and their economic benefits be lost; they could directly contribute to climate change by releasing a large amount of trapped greenhouse gases. That assessment from scientists taking part in …
Oceanic anoxic events (OAEs) were episodes of widespread marine anoxia during which large amounts of organic carbon were buried on the ocean floor under oxygen-deficient bottom waters. OAE2, occurring at the Cenomanian/Turonian boundary (about 93.5 Myr ago), is the most widespread and best defined OAE of the mid-Cretaceous. Although the …
TIMES VIEW Store it but after proper testing The proposal to store carbon dioxide in the depths of some of the world's deepest oceans is not a slapdash solution put together by myopic scientists as some environmentalists would have us believe. Instead the concept is the creation of concerned climatologists …
It all seemed too easy by half: to beat global warming just sprinkle some iron in the ocean, then watch as algae bloom en masse, sucking up carbon dioxide by the tonne. Now the idea is looking increasingly unlikely to go ahead in a big way. In the wake of …
The introduction of payments for environmental services (PES) offers an opportunity for traditional and indigenous populations to be compensated for contributing to carbon sequestration in meeting the challenge of ameliorating global warming. As one mechanism among several for promoting biodiversity conservation and sustainable development, pro-poor PES initiatives could eventually be …
Millions Of Tonnes Buried By Norwegian Platform Sleipner Platform: With planet Earth engaged in a heated race against global warming, "carbon capture and storage' (CCS) has brought a ray of hope, and a Norwegian gas platform is leading the way. The Sleipner platform in the North Sea, a mammoth steel …
We have heard all about Al Gore's inconvenient truths on climate change. Now comes an extremely convenient truth from his German counterpart. Social Democrat MP Hermann Scheer, who has been dubbed more revolutionary than Greenpeace, says the great unspoken truth is how painless it will be to convert the world …
One way to combat global warming is by sequestering the carbon dioxide belched out by power stations, locking it away in buried vaults. A big problem, though, is that only about a tenth of the gas produced by burning fossil fuels is CO2. Most of the rest is nitrogen, which …
Grind it down, pour in a sprinkle here and a dash there, and wait for results. That's the recipe for helping the oceans to absorb more of our carbon dioxide emissions: add limestone. It may not only help reduce global warming but could even reinvigorate ailing coral reefs.
Data laboriously extracted from an Antarctic ice core provide an unprecedented view of temperature, and levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide and methane, over the past 800,000 years of Earth's history.
Unable to cut down on its coal usage, it seems that the West is looking to burry its co2 emissions underground. The British government, for example, has become zealous about the carbon capture and storage (ccs) technology. Its high commission in Delhi has already organized two workshops on the technology …
Carbon capture and storage, as is evident from its appellation, has three stages. At the first stage, CO2 is separated from other components of emissions like water vapour, nitrous oxide and sulphur oxide. The gas is then transported to the storage site either, via a pipeline, by ship and by …
The Forest Department will soon finalise the mechanism for making payments to farmers under the carbon credit scheme for raising forests on private and community land as part of the World Bank-funded Mid-Himalayan Watershed Development Project. Himachal last year became the first state in Asia and only second in the …
In a recent paper in the journal Carbon Balance and Management (vol 3, p 1), Ning Zeng, an atmospheric scientist at the University of Maryland in College Park calculated that if we buried half of the wood that grows each year, in such a way that it didn't decay, enough …
Costa Rica pioneered the use of the payments for environmental services (PES) approach in developing countries by establishing a formal, country-wide program of payments, the PSA program. The PSA program has worked hard to develop mechanisms to charge the users of environmental services for the services they receive. It has …
The Earth's climate is changing because the composition of our atmosphere is being altered, primarily as a consequence of human activity. We are now also experiencing a non-cyclical rise in the global temperature caused by the accumulation of the so-called "greenhouse gases"--carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous oxide and others. The bottom …
Few payment for environmental services (PES) schemes in developing countries operate outside of the central state's umbrella, and are at the same time old enough to allow for a meaningful evaluation. Ecuador has two such decentralised, consolidated experiences: the five-year old Pimampiro municipal watershed-protection scheme and the twelve-year old PROFAFOR …
Ecosystems of the Iwokrama rainforest reserve in Guyana have been sold off. A uk -based private equity firm, Canopy Capital, has purchased the rights to environmental services generated by the 371,000-hectare tropical forest. In return, the firm has guaranteed a "meaningful contribution' to the forest's running costs for five years. …
Australia has launched its first carbon capture and storage (ccs) project. Touted as the deepest geological storage of CO2, the project will capture and compress about 100,000 tonnes of CO2 and inject it into a depleted natural gas reservoir two km underground. While there are similar carbon storage facilities in …
