Fleeing Vesuvius: Overcoming the Risks of Economic and Environmental Collapse by Fallon Gillian & Douthwaite Richard

Author:Fallon, Gillian & Douthwaite, Richard [Fallon, Gillian]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: BUS072000
Publisher: New Society Publishers
Published: 2011-04-05T04:00:00+00:00

With remote sensing, a country could report and account comprehensively for everything that affects the types of land that, like pastureland, forests and bogs, can be either a sink or a source depending on management methods and the climate itself. This is particularly important because rising temperatures and altered rainfall patterns will play a large part in determining whether land releases carbon or takes it in.

At present, under the Kyoto Protocol’s Article 3.4, Ireland can choose to operate on Tier 2 and account for carbon gains and losses from forest management, cropland management and the management of pasture land. So far, Ireland has not accounted for these carbon gains and losses, mainly for lack of data, and operates on Tier 1, which uses default figures rather than country-specific ones to estimate emissions. To use Tier 2, for example, cropland and grazing land management require data going back to 1990. However, this data requirement would disappear if a switch was made to remote sensing as it would no longer be necessary to establish a trend line and estimate changes in the trend. All that would be necessary would be to use an aircraft to carry out a baseline LIDAR survey that was calibrated by on-ground sampling. The sampling would measure AGB, below-ground biomass and soil carbon. Leaf litter and deadwood could also be included if desired. The aerial survey would then be repeated regularly at the same time each year and a calculation carried out to establish the carbon gained or lost.

If the EU adopted remote sensing for its emissions returns it could pilot its use by the rest of the world at a later date. The adoption is likely to save money. Not only is it cheaper to gather the required information by remote techniques but New Zealand has also found that it can recover the cost about 22 times because it ensures that country’s eligibility to offset GHG emissions above the 1990 level of emissions and to participate in international carbon trading.

At least some of the revenue each member state received for holding and, in some cases, increasing the biomass and soil carbon stock should be used by the state to encourage further increases in the carbon held. A system of rewards to individual landowners would be impractical because of the difficulty of measuring soil carbon with sufficient accuracy, especially as the remote-sensing results are optimized to show changes from year to year rather than exactly what was on the ground when the over-flight took place. As a result, Teagasc, the Irish Agriculture and Food Development Authority, suggests that a new definition of best farming practice be devised and that the adoption of this be incentivized by the program that is being developed to replace the Rural Environment Protection Scheme (REPS). This could include activities that lead to lower agricultural emissions and the increase in carbon in biomass and the soil. CCSN has been asked to help devise this “Carbon REPS.”

Irish Land-Based Emissions: A Three-Gas Problem

In global warming terms,

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