Recognizing Risk – Raising Ambition – Realizing Solutions

Woodwell Climate Research Center is uniquely dedicated to climate science pursued in partnership with stakeholders and decision-makers to produce maximum societal benefit. Our renowned researchers investigate how human activities are affecting the flow of carbon and water—key climate factors—through some of the world’s most critical ecosystems, from the Arctic to the tropics. Together with our global network of partners, we generate novel insights into the risks we face, and the just, effective solutions we can develop. 

Our COP26 delegation is working to ensure that the world’s leaders recognize the full magnitude of current climate risks and respond with more ambitious, science-based targets and strategies. 

Recognizing Risk

The impacts of climate change are here and now; they are already material and will only continue to worsen as atmospheric carbon levels rise. Understanding the socioeconomic and geopolitical risks of climate change is critical to informing both mitigation and adaptation efforts, yet decision-makers face obstacles in accessing relevant risk assessments. We’re working with the COP26 Presidency to identify and overcome those obstacles, and enable more ambitious policies and practices.

Raising Ambition

Frozen Arctic ground, termed permafrost, presents the greatest under-recognized challenge to climate change mitigation. As the Arctic warms, permafrost thaws and the vast stores of carbon it contains become vulnerable to decomposition and release in the form of greenhouse gases. This process threatens the success of international efforts to limit rising atmospheric carbon levels and resulting warming. Yet, due to the challenges associated with monitoring and predicting the timing, magnitude, and form of permafrost thaw emissions, this critically important feedback has been largely left out of carbon budgets and climate policy. We’re working to ensure permafrost thaw emissions are tracked and accounted for.

Realizing Solutions

Tropical forests act like air conditioners for the planet – producing rain, providing shade and habitat, and trapping and storing nearly a fifth of human greenhouse gas emissions. Protecting standing forests is an essential, immediately effective, but under-utilized natural climate solution. With our network of on-the-ground partners in Brazil, we’re developing and deploying evidence-based strategies to incentivize forest conservation in agricultural landscapes, while also working with partners in the financial world to improve the accountability and transparency of carbon markets and rapidly scale up finance for forest protection.

Over a quarter of the planet’s ice-free land is used for the grazing of livestock, and these rangelands hold 30% of global soil carbon.

Conversion of prairie to cropland and overgrazing has caused substantial soil carbon loss. However, through improved land management, rangelands offer an enormous opportunity to sequester CO2 from the atmosphere and limit climate change.

Our Work

Carbon Monitoring in Rangelands is a research program aimed at understanding and unlocking the promise of rangeland management as a natural climate solution. We provide tools and data that can help ranchers, policymakers, and tribal agencies track the land’s forage production and carbon balance. This information has broad applications—it provides land managers with the ability to monitor indicators of ecological status, assess the impacts of land management choices, and effectively engage with carbon markets.

In collaboration with Columbia University and others, we developed the novel Rangeland Carbon Tracking and Management Tool (RCTM), a low-cost remote sensing and field data informed system for monitoring plant productivity and the ecosystem carbon balance of grassland systems at local to regional scales. The RCTM framework utilizes open source data, is peer reviewed (Xia et al., 2024, in review), and the underlying source code is freely available.

We are implementing the RCTM across two million acres of grasslands in the Northern Great Plains as part of an ambitious pilot carbon monitoring study, in partnership with the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation, the Audubon Conservation Ranching initiative, and World Wildlife Fund’s Ranch Systems and Viability Planning program. We are also applying the RCTM at ranches in western Colorado (with Western States Ranches) and other regions, to further test and refine the approach.

Our goals are to:

  1. Demonstrate that changes in carbon storage due to changes in grassland management can be affordably and accurately measured
  2. Quantify rangeland carbon sequestration and longer-term trajectories of changes in net ecosystem CO2 exchange and soil carbon stocks across the region
  3. Begin to understand the climate benefits of improved grazing management systems and other grassland conservation projects

We aim to make the RCTM operational for all grazing lands within the U.S. and North America, and the data available at no cost to ranchers and land managers from State, Federal, and Tribal agencies.

Our Impact

By developing the RCTM and a free web application, our aim is to provide grazing lands managers with a high-resolution, 20+ year record of changes in carbon fluxes and soil carbon storage. With this accurate and timely data on rangeland forage and carbon change, more producers can adopt conservation and management practices that lead to more efficient, productive land with climate benefits.

 

Support provided by:
Conscience Bay Research
Mighty Arrow Family Foundation
J.M. Kapland Fund
Woodwell Fund for Climate Solutions