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Canadian Youth Delegation to Poznan
This is the official blog of the Canadian Youth Delegation to the UN climate negotiations in Poznan, Poland (COP14/CMP4). The delegation, a project of the Canadian Youth Climate Coalition and TakingITGlobal, is a diverse team of committed young Canadian leaders, from coast to coast to coast. They will be live on the ground at the talks in Poland from Nov. 29th to Dec. 12th. Stay tuned for the latest news and updates from these critical negotiations!!

Check out cydpoznan.org for more information!



TheaWhitman   TheaWhitman Thea's TIGblog
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Soil Carbon at the COP (finally)!
About this event: The UN Climate Change Conference - Poznan, Dec 08

Translations available in: English (original) | French | Spanish | Italian | German | Portuguese | Swedish | Russian | Dutch | Arabic

Since everyone else will probably cover the workshop from the Ad-Hoc Working Group for the Kyoto Protocol (AWG-KP), where Canada explained very nicely how we live far away from each other and it gets very cold here in the winter, so... you know... mitigation... what can you do?... I will fill you in on what's happening on soil carbon at the COP! There was a presentation today from the Food and Agriculture Organization of the UN (FAO) where they discussed the role of agriculture in greenhouse gas mitigation from the last report from the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), payment for environmental services systems (where they pay farmers for using certain agricultural practices), and the results from the report: Challenges and Opportunities for Mitigation in the Agricultural Sector.

Basically, 10-12% of global anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions come from the agricultural sector and they are growing - between 1990 and 2005, emissions increased by 17% - and will likely continue to grow with the world's population. The major sources of emissions that you'll hear about are methane and nitrous oxide, from manure management, livestock digestion, or rice cultivation. However, soils also play a major role in agricultural emissions. Besides nitrous oxide emissions from nitrification processes in soil, soil carbon loss can also result in greenhouse gas emissions as well as soil degradation.

There are a few methods for enhancing soil carbon stocks, such as no-till or reduced-till agriculture, cover cropping, or other land-use changes. However, the two major issues with these problems are that 1) there is likely an upper limit on the total amount of carbon that can be sequestered in soil, so the returns on carbon storage efforts diminish with time, and 2) if the new agricultural practices are changed, the stored carbon can be released relatively quickly, undoing the sequestration. The cool thing about adding biochar, or black carbon, to soil, is that these two problems are not an issue (plus there are other super-interesting positive effects for agricultural productivity and soil health).

At the next meeting in Bonn in March, the Ad-Hoc Working Group on Long-term Co-operative Action (AWG-LCA), there's gonna be a workshop on agriculture and greenhouse gas mitigation - I'll be really excited to hear what happens, as I am sure you all will be!

December 3, 2008 | 6:50 PM Comments  0 comments

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