Carbon: The Ecosystems View

How do ecosystems affect atmospheric carbon? It turns out they keep the atmosphere in balance more than one might think.

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This video is based on the writing of Charles Eisenstein. Visit Charles' Website for more related content: https://www.charleseisenstein.org/
Visit Charles' YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/user/CharlesEisenstein/

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Sources:

Deforestation's effect on atmospheric CO2:
Rosa, Isabel M.D., et al. The Environmental Legacy of Modern Tropical Deforestation. 2016. https://www.cell.com/current-biology/fulltext/S0960-9822(16)30625-X

The contribution of land-use changes to atmospheric CO2:
Arneth, A., Sitch, S., Pongratz, J. et al. Historical carbon dioxide emissions caused by land-use changes are possibly larger than assumed. 2017. https://www.nature.com/articles/ngeo2882

Atmospheric CO2 has been rising slower than expected in emissions-centric models:
Keenan, Trevor F et al. Recent pause in the growth rate of atmospheric CO2 due to enhanced terrestrial carbon uptake. 2016. https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms13428

45.8% of trees have been cut down:
Crowther, T., Glick, H., Covey, K. et al. Mapping tree density at a global scale. 2015. https://www.nature.com/articles/nature14967

Wetlands have declined by 57%:
Davidson, Nick. How much wetland has the world lost? Long-term and recent trends in a global wetland area. 2014. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/266388496_How_much_wetland_has_the_world_lost_Long-term_and_recent_trends_in_global_wetland_area

80% of the seagrass meadows on the New England coast are gone:
Beem, Nora & Short, Frederick., Subtidal Eelgrass Declines in the Great Bay Estuary, New Hampshire, and Maine, USA. 2009. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/226257090_Subtidal_Eelgrass_Declines_in_the_Great_Bay_Estuary_New_Hampshire_and_Maine_USA

Most of the conversation
about carbon today

is about fossil fuel emissions.

And most of the energy
of environmentalists,

in the climate movement, especially,

is to find ways
to reduce carbon emissions.

What has been left out
of the conversation

to a large extent, not entirely,

is the role of forests
and wetlands and soil

in sequestering carbon -

taking carbon out of the atmosphere -

and restoring a healthy carbon cycle,

where whatever carbon is produced,
it is reabsorbed again.

What I have learned

is that the contribution
of land-use changes

to atmospheric carbon

is at least as much as the contribution
of burning fossil fuels.

Exposing soil to oxidation

puts tremendous amounts
of CO2 into the air,

and the ruin of the biological systems

prevents that released carbon
from being brought back into the soil,

when trees and grass and other plants
uptake carbon from the air,

a lot of it goes underground,
taking the form of organic compounds,

which means carbon
containing compounds that form soil,

and that stay underground
could be for a year,

could be for a decade,
for a hundred years.

Some of them are
deeply sequestered in the soil

so they're constantly
pulling carbon out of the air

and putting it underground

so much so that carbon dioxide levels
in the atmosphere have been rising

just lower than would have been expected

in models that are based
on how much we're emitting.

The reason that they increased
slower than expected

is because the more
there is in the atmosphere

the more the plants take up.

Of course, they're not
increasing their uptake

fast enough to offset emissions,

but it points to the capacity for life
to maintain atmospheric balance

if we're not getting in the way.

Unfortunately, we're getting in the way.

Today I think we have something

like half of the trees
that we had before civilization.

Half of the mangrove swamps of Asia
have been destroyed.

80% of the seagrass meadows
on their New England coast for gone.

We have rising emissions,

and these organs of Gaia
that maintain a healthy carbon cycle

have been destroyed.

So what are we going to do about it?

Subtitles by Maurício Kakuei Tanaka