The last decade has shattered global temperature records, with all 10 of the planet’s warmest years occurring since 2015. Under the Paris Climate Agreement, countries across the world are working to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius by decreasing their heat-trapping greenhouse gas emissions. But researchers say more action is needed to protect us from the worst impacts of climate change.

“We’re beyond the point where emission cuts alone are going to keep us within a safe climate range. We need to remove carbon from the atmosphere,” Dr. Jonathan Sanderman, carbon program director and senior scientist at Woodwell Climate Research Center, says. “And there’s really two ways of doing that: tech-based solutions, like direct air capture or other engineering-based solutions, or we could try to reverse the last several 100 years of degrading nature and pull more carbon back into the biosphere.”

While both solutions are likely needed, Sanderman and others at Woodwell Climate are focused on using the power of natural environments, such as forests, wetlands, agricultural land, and rangelands, to reduce carbon in the atmosphere. These methods, called nature-based climate solutions, help combat climate change in three major ways: decreasing greenhouse gas emissions from deforestation, capturing and storing carbon from the atmosphere, and building ecosystems more resilient to climate hazards such as flooding and wildfires, according to the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN).

Natural climate solutions could contribute more than 30% of the cost-effective climate solutions needed globally in the next few decades. They could also save countries hardest hit by climate change $393 billion in 2050 and reduce climate hazards by 26%.

Storing carbon on land

Sanderman researches one of Earth’s largest carbon pools: the soil. Plants release carbon they’ve absorbed from the atmosphere back into the ground when they die, which stores a total of about 2,500 gigatons of carbon globally.

“Soils hold four times as much as trees do — about three times as much as the atmosphere,” Sanderman says.

Good land management can stabilize the amount of carbon in soil, but soils across the world have degraded substantially due to cultivation and overgrazing around the turn of the century.

Storing carbon in the ground not only reduces the level of this greenhouse gas in the atmosphere, but carbon is the backbone of soil organic matter, which is a key regulator of soil health and crop yield consistency. It helps reduce erosion, keep soil structure in place and retain water. Carbon is often used as an indication of soil quality, with healthy soils usually containing about 2% organic carbon. Yet, precisely determining how much carbon is stored in soils worldwide — and which land management techniques lead to the most efficient carbon storage — is tricky.

Rangelands as a nature-based climate solution

Sanderman is working with Dr. Jennifer Watts, the Arctic program director and an associate scientist at Woodwell Climate, to understand how much carbon dioxide U.S. rangelands are helping capture. These lands have big potential for sinking carbon: Rangelands make up about 31% of land area across the U.S. and about 54% across the world. Using both field data and satellite data, Sanderman and Watts are creating models of overall rangeland health in the U.S. Using this information, they can then quantify how much carbon is gained or lost over time under different scenarios.

“We are hoping, with our integrated system, to be able to provide the ability to scan all landscapes to determine their carbon status, and then go back in time and look at the trajectories of change,” Watts explains. “And provide that information directly to the land managers so they can make really informed decisions on where they should invest conservation work. At the same time, it’s great for us, because as an output, we get to quantify how much carbon is being gained versus lost in certain places and what the climate benefits are.”

Capturing Methane

While carbon dioxide is one of the most abundant and long-lasting greenhouse gases, methane is far more efficient at trapping heat in the atmosphere. Per molecule, it’s about 80 times more harmful in the atmosphere than carbon dioxide, though it lasts an average of only a decade in the air, whereas carbon dioxide can persist for centuries. Nevertheless, reducing methane emissions by 45% by 2030 could help us reach our goal of limiting global warming to 1.5°C, per the United Nations.

Cutting anthropogenic methane emissions should be prioritized, but using nature-based solutions to increase uptake can also help bring down methane concentrations in the atmosphere. Although forests and soils play a smaller role in methane cycling, “When you start thinking about how much they can do over large areas, the numbers really get big,” Watts says. “And then it makes a huge difference.”

In northern forests across the U.S., Woodwell Climate researchers have set up methane monitoring systems, including specialized towers that measure the exchange of greenhouse gases, energy, and water between the ecosystem and the atmosphere. The team also analyzes soil samples from the forest to see exactly where methane-consuming and methane-producing microbes are thriving.

The team has discovered a unique feature of the Howland Research Forest in Maine: It is an overall methane sink — though exactly why remains unknown. But by understanding more about how and under which conditions these methane-consuming microbes live, forest managers can change their strategies to harness the creatures’ natural power to reduce the effects of climate change.

To combat the climate crisis, we must do “a lot of things simultaneously,” Watts says, including using good land management practices to capture and store greenhouse gases.

“Working with nature has a lot of advantages, because you’re optimizing the health of ecosystems, at the same time providing ecosystem services, not just for climate but also for local communities,” Watts says. “If we identify how to do this effectively, we’re really unleashing the power of something that’s already there, and then trying to work with it instead of against it.”

With Trump and climate change, denial is a hell of a drug

Trump is trying make a climate report go extinct

cars in the flooded parking lot of a strip mall, with water reaching about halfway up their tires

Facts can be awfully stubborn things. And they’re especially inconvenient for the Trump administration.

So the president and his goons are simply disappearing them, deleting vast tranches of scientific, health, and other data from federal websites.

Why bother with a debate over the facts when you can fix it so they don’t exist in the first place? It’s much easier to deem racial health disparities a myth if there’s no longer a massive reservoir of government data showing otherwise, for example. And it’s easier to suggest vaccines cause autism if you scrub the data suggesting that theory is a massive and deadly crock.

Nowhere has this approach been clearer than on climate and the environment, where, in its efforts at “Reinvigorating America’s Beautiful Clean Coal Industry,” the administration has demanded that thousands of datasets be removed from federal websites, including the State Department, the Department of Agriculture, and NASA — or hidden so the public cannot find them.

Read more on Permafrost Pathways.

A new study, published today in the peer-reviewed journal Biological Conservation and co-authored by scientists from Woodwell Climate Research Center and Wild Heritage, finds that greater protections of mature and old-growth forests in the United States are critical to meeting global commitments to forestall the climate and biodiversity crisis. The research underscores why safeguarding the nation’s carbon stockpile in older forests needs to be a focus of U.S. policy to reduce emissions from commercial logging and burning of fossil fuels.

Using a new approach combining remote sensing of forest structure with ground data from the federal Forest Inventory and Analysis (FIA) program, the research team analyzed younger, mature, and old-growth forests across the contiguous U.S., looking at their size and carbon stocks, as well as ownership (public or private) and protection status, to examine how much additional carbon could be protected if stricter regulations were in place to curb commercial timber harvesting.

According to the study, contiguous U.S. forests currently hold 54.3 billion tonnes of carbon. However, 83% of that carbon stock remains unprotected, revealing the critical role that policy action to prevent increased logging of federal forests can play in promoting ecosystem benefits and enabling U.S. forests to reach their full carbon storage potential. This is especially true for mature and old-growth forests, which provide the greatest climate and biodiversity benefits.

“Mature and old-growth forests are made up of our oldest and typically largest trees, that not only store massive amounts of carbon right now, but can continue to accumulate carbon for centuries if protected. These forests also play an irreplaceable role in maintaining biodiversity, fostering ecosystem resilience, promoting human health, and much more,” said Dr. Rich Birdsey, Senior Scientist at Woodwell Climate and lead author of the study. “As communities everywhere feel the real time consequences of the climate crisis, our policies must reflect the urgent and unparalleled importance of preserving these forests to reduce emissions and bring global temperatures back down.”

With stepped-up protection measures that avoid logging of mature and old-growth forests and large trees, and allow mature forests to develop into old growth over time, researchers found that the total carbon stored in these forests could increase by 10.8 billion tonnes within decades, locking away the equivalent of eight full years of fossil fuel emissions in the United States.

“Our study points to the urgency of protecting the nation’s best natural climate solution, especially as the current administration begins to ramp up logging on public lands under the President’s executive orders,” said Dr. Dominick A. DellaSala, Chief Scientist at Wild Heritage and study co-author. “This is the worst possible time for backpedaling on forest protections and our international commitments for a safe climate.”

The study can be found here.

Thawing grounds, rising stakes: The importance of including permafrost emissions in climate policy

a small building is perched on scaffolding on the tundra, with stairs leading to the building sinking into a puddle of water. the building has a blue sign on it that says "alaska army national guard"

As the world races to limit global warming to 1.5°C, a critical and often overlooked climate threat looms: the rapid thaw of permafrost in Arctic regions. Permafrost1)—continuously frozen ground that covers vast portions of the Arctic—is thawing, releasing large amounts of greenhouse gases (GHGs) previously locked in frozen soils, amplifying warming at a scale that could derail global climate goals. Current international climate plans put the world on track for a warming of around 2.7°C, far exceeding the Paris Agreement’s target.2) Yet emissions from thawing permafrost remain largely absent from Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs)—the cornerstone of international climate commitments under the Paris Agreement. This article explores why permafrost emissions are excluded from NDCs and the consequences of this omission, and proposes concrete steps to ensure that permafrost emissions are fully integrated into future climate strategies. This substantial gap in climate policy threatens Arctic ecosystems and the global effort to stabilize the climate.

Passed in 1970, the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) requires U.S. federal agencies to assess the environmental impacts of their proposed actions prior to implementing them. To facilitate this, and to ensure decisionmaking is uniform across government agencies, the law stipulates regulations around the process for conducting these impact assessments. A March ruling from the Council of Environmental Quality (CEQ) removes these regulations, opening up the possibility for regulatory confusion and inconsistency between agencies that ultimately lessens the effectiveness of environmental protections.

Woodwell Climate Research Center submitted a public comment on the ruling, criticizing the move for its potential to hinder coherent decisionmaking based on rigorous science. The comment states:

“NEPA reviews are not an impediment to “major federal actions” but provide an essential, science-based safeguard for ensuring that decisionmaking adequately balances a myriad of interests. This balance is especially critical in areas of the United States where increasingly frequent natural disturbances and extreme events threaten to derail the durability of a proposed federal action.”

The comment speaks to the effectiveness of the existing environmental review process, especially for decisionmaking in Alaska, where construction projects were guided to consider the impacts of permafrost thaw and erosion as part of hydrological and ground assessments, and in forest management plans, where the NEPA review process ensures management strategies are scrutinized with empirical data.

The ruling is considered “interim final” which means it can be put into effect before comments have been considered and is not dependent on public input. Despite this, engaging in the rulemaking process is one critical way Woodwell Climate contributes to environmental policy. It ensures that technical expertise is part of the public record, and provides evidence that can be used in court cases should the ruling or any action based on it be challenged in the future.

The full comment can be read here.

Guest commentary: We must stand together

a woman in a white lab coat and purple gloves uses a pipette in the lab

Falmouth is more than just a picturesque coastal town; it is a vibrant village of discovery built over decades around the pillars of science, education and environmental stewardship. In the same way, the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI), Woodwell Climate Research Center and Marine Biological Laboratory (MBL) are not just esteemed institutions, but integral parts of our community.

Continue reading on The Falmouth Enterprise.