Carbon Sinks Under Threat

This page will look at non-energy carbon emissions, especially the destruction of carbon sinks

Agricultural soil - bad farming practices releasing vast stores of CO2
Rain forests - encroachment for palm oil, soy bean, beef production etc
Mangrove swamps ripped out for prawn farming
Peatlands - draining, erosion, peat cutting, etc
Seagrasses - trawler damage wrecking major carbon sinks
Biofuels displacing agricultural land
Rice cultivation - campaign to change rice farming to reduce its very high emissions
Forestry - World's forests being burned down for 'biomass', paper & packaging
Why planting trees is a very weak solution to a major problem

More details coming soon

Agricultural soil

Poor farming practices are turning farmlands from a vital carbon sink into net carbon emitters

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Rain Forest

It isn't just the Amazon - what's happening around the world's rain forests?

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Mangrove swamps

Dense mangroves that line much of the world's coasts are being ripped out, often to farm prawns

Mangrove swamps trap vast amounts of carbon beneath them, but all around the world, farmers are ripping them out unnecessarily to farm prawns. The results include coastal erosion and very large releases of carbon.

The sad thing is that prawn farming can be just as profitable without ripping out the mangroves.
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Peatlands

Peat, a pre-cursor to coal, is essentially made of carbon. Its loss is highly polluting

Peat accumulates over millennia beneath a living carpet of vegetation that has evolved to thrive in its harsh environment. The main contributor to UK peat is sphagnum moss (check), but other peats around the world host other plant forms that live, die, and sink into swampy acidic ground where it doesn't decompose.

The two main problems today are:
(1) Land use change - draining peatlands for farming or construction destroys the acidic water that stops it being consumed by micro-organisms that turn plant matter into CO2. The result is massive releases of carbon dioxide, and rapid wind-blown soil erosion, wiping huge volumes of peat
(2) peat farming (where peat is quarried to use as fertiliser or fuel)


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Seagrasses

Some of the world's greatest carbon sinks may be in our seas

Seagrasses and mangrove swamps may be really large carbon sinks, trapping amounts of carbon comparable to tropical rainforests (check). But these resources are under threat.

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Biofuels

Displacing agricultural land and increasing carbon emissions

In an effort to make petrol more sustainable, the UK adopted the 'E10' standard in 2021, so now fuel contains 10% bioethanol by volume. But how sustainable is biofuel?

The first problem is that biofuels displace agricultural land. The UK imported 3/4 of its bioethanol in 2023, but the other 25% came from fermenting 400,000 tonnes of wheat grown on 110,000 acres of prime agricultural land. That's OK in the UK, as we can simply import wheat (and biofuels) to meed any demand, but somewhere down the line, either people are going hungry, or wilderness is being ploughed up to grow biocrops, much as rainforest is cleared to grow palm oil.

The other problem is that monocultivation depletes soil nutrients, can increase topsoil erosion, increase water demand, and lead to loss of previously locked-away soil carbon, as ground is churned up and exposed to the air.

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Rice cultivation

World's most cultivated crop is a major contributor to global warming

(a) Methane emissions

Growing rice in flooded paddy fields causes very high methane emissions. Continuous flooding fosters microbes that produce 40 million tonnes of methane each year ... that is 10% of all the world's methane emissions ⁽¹⁾,equivalent to 3.3 billion tonnes of CO₂. Methane emissions per kg of rice grain cultivated are typically around 2.4kg CO_{2 eq} (ranging from 0.014kg to 4.9kg)⁽²⁾.

Rice methane emissions could be reduced by 50% through changes to irrigation and other habits. These include allowing fields to dry out for part of the season, direct wet-seeding, composting rice straw and planting hybrid species ⁽³⁾

(b) Black carbon emissions

Another easily solved problem with rice in India is burning stubble, responsible for 5% of global black carbon emissions (smoke). Black carbon is a major health hazard, and contributes both to sun blocking and heat absorption.

Black carbon emissions could 'easily' be eliminated with better farming practices. For example, a $2,000 'Happy Seeder' can serve many smallholders for years - it cuts, lifts, and mulches rice straw and stubble into the field, improving (wheat) grain yield, thereby saving money with no burning.

NOTE - Many rice small-holder/cultivators are amongst the world's most vulnerable to extreme poverty and malnutrition, with least access to resources to effect change.

Forestry

It isn't just rainforests under threat - The world's forests are all being farmed

Drax power station in Yorkshire burns wood pellets for electricity, putting 20 million tonnes of CO2 into the air each year ... a full 5% of the UK's total emissions! Most of these wood pellets are sourced from forests in the USA, often virgin forest. The result is that carbon that was locked up in trees has been pumped into the atmosphere, and the stripped land could take a century or more to regain its carbon.

The paper and packaging industries also eat millions of trees which take many years to grow back.

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Did we miss something?

Have you got a story for this page? Please do tell us what we're missing!

Please send stories to ian.glatt@gmail.com.

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