Greenhouse gas sinks

By Bhaskar Anand

It was 1965 when the U.S. president's advisory panel warned that the greenhouse effect is a matter of "real concern" for this planet. In 1972 the first United Nations (UN) environment conference was organized in Stockholm, Sweden, concluding emerging concerns about climate change.

As an immediate response, they also laid the foundations of the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) to mitigate the rising climate issues. Further, in 1988, UNEP established the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) to collate and assess evidence on climate change.

The scientific assessments on climate change by IPCC suggested that for the 20th-century the average global temperature increased by 0.85°C. As a result, the oceans expanded due to warming and ice melt led to an average sea level rise of 19cm. By the start of the 21st century, global emissions of carbon dioxide (CO2) had almost doubled since 1990. Consequently, it is expected that global temperatures will exceed 1.5°C by the end of the 21st century.

Because of that, the average sea level rise was predicted as 24-30cm by 2065 and 40-63cm by 2100. Additionally, IPCC also remarked that most aspects of climate change will persist for many centuries even if emissions were stopped.

At present, climate change is an evident and well-established phenomenon leading to serious consequences such as extreme weather events, rising sea levels, and droughts among other things. Under U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change-21, 196 countries around the world signed the Paris climate accord in 2015. This is an agreement within the U.N. framework to deal with greenhouse-gas-emissions mitigation, adaptation, and finance.

The U.N. is working to help accelerate climate action and assist countries in limiting global warming to achieve the goals of the Paris Agreement (2015). The agreement focused extensively on mitigating greenhouse gas by sustainably reducing carbon emissions without affecting food production and developing climate adaptability/climate resilience.

Greenhouse gas sinks and reservoirs are repository systems which absorb more greenhouse gas than they release, such as peatlands, wetland, oceans, soil, and forests. The process of capturing and storing CO2 from the atmosphere is also called carbon sequestration and it is very important for maintaining the carbon cycle.

The IPCC recommended cutting off carbon emission as well as recognition, conservation, and enhancement of greenhouse gas sinks and reservoirs. Despite this, a majority of member countries are estimating and setting their goals focused in terms of emission cut off and don't say much about their goals of conservation and enhancement of greenhouse gas sinks and reservoirs.

To achieve the long-term temperature goal set by the Paris climate accord, it is very important to establish stress-free greenhouse gas cycles. To reduce stress, we need greenhouse gas sinks and reservoirs quantitatively comparable to emission sources.

Recently, several governments and administrative bodies from developed as well as developing economies set their target and made announcements regarding their plan to cut carbon emissions between 50 percent to 80 percent by 2030. However, they seem to be dubious regarding their implementation of the plan. Emission cut-off is important for the combat of climate change. However, the establishment of new sinks and conservation of available ones is equally or even more important.

Conservation and enhancement of greenhouse gas sinks and reservoirs are indeed a bit difficult due to market forces. The rising global population is governing these market forces based on the demand and supply of commodities and other resources such as land and water.

However, global multilateral cooperation in terms of monetary and technology exchange may be helpful for the safeguarding and intensification of greenhouse gas sinks and basins. Some strategies such as carbon tax, carbon trading, and climate finance should also be considered for preventing climate change and accomplishing climate action.

Bhaskar Anand (abhaskar@hanyang.ac.kr) is a doctoral student working in the field of air quality and material application at the Department of Civil and environmental engineering, Hanyang University.