To sustain the world’s growing population, we need both farms and forests. Tanguro provides a window into this critical balancing act.

Located in Mato Grosso, Brazil, Tanguro is a field research station on a working agricultural farm at the Amazonian agricultural frontier, which has experienced some of the highest rates of deforestation and fire in past decades. It is a varied landscape with over 40 thousand hectares of croplands producing soybeans, cotton, maize, and beans, and an equal area of standing native forest—making it a model for research on the complex interplay between forests, agriculture, biodiversity, and climate.

For twenty years, Tanguro has served as a research and education hub for Woodwell Climate Research Center and Instituto de Pesquisa Ambiental da Amazônia (IPAM Amazônia, Amazon Environmental Research Institute), as well as others. Research at Tanguro has generated more than 240 scientific publications in 20 years, and the field station’s facilities and staff have supported over 215 students from around the world in developing their Ph.D. dissertations or master’s theses, completing short research internships or field courses, or learning how to better communicate science to the general public.

Tanguro lies in the southern Amazon, the driest portion of the Amazon Basin, and harbors a transitional forest between Amazon forests and Cerrado/savannas. It was originally deforested and converted to cattle pasture in the mid-1980s. Conversion to croplands began in the early 2000s and was completed by 2008. Starting in 2010, it underwent a rapid shift from soybean single-cropping to soybean-corn double-cropping in a single season. In 2020 there was another rapid shift, with more than half of the farm devoted to cotton.

The topography, soils, hydrology, climate, and farming practices at Tanguro are typical of the southern and eastern Amazonian agricultural frontier. Because of those conditions, and particularly a long dry season, the agriculture and natural vegetation are very sensitive to even modest changes in fire occurrence, climate, and their interactions.

Woodwell Climate’s work at Tanguro Research Station is supported by the National Science Foundation, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, Bayer, Max Planck Institute, São Paulo Research Foundation, Yale University, and Woodwell Climate’s Fund for Climate Solutions.

To address the climate crisis, we must take urgent action to reduce anthropogenic emissions while simultaneously removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.

Land management has the potential to do both, but to realize this potential we must understand how much storage space is available, where that space is located, and what actions can be taken in those places to capitalize on these natural climate solutions as soon as possible.

The latest report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)’s Working Group III highlights the significant mitigation potential of natural and managed ecosystems given the opportunity they offer to remove additional carbon from the atmosphere. Many countries are expected to count heavily on natural climate solutions when designing strategies for delivering on their commitments to climate change mitigation under the Paris Agreement.

Our Work

Impact

Data produced as part of this project should prove valuable for national and jurisdictional prioritization of actions and locations to increase land-based carbon storage and realize meaningful near-term climate benefits.

As the threat of climate change grows, so does the need for accessible climate risk analyses.

The way that Earth’s natural systems respond to a rapidly warming climate will impact our quality of life for generations to come. To protect against future climate-driven risks, municipalities must be armed with the most up-to-date and location-specific science so they can make informed grant-writing, planning, zoning, and adaptation decisions.

Woodwell has cultivated municipal partnerships with cities and towns that have long-term sustainability goals, providing them with the information they need to make climate-smart decisions. We are now looking to grow the cohort of cities and municipalities we work with—across the United States and Global South—to provide assessments of a range of physical climate hazards for future adaptation planning.

We make this critical, ongoing investment because we know that combining technical expertise with local knowledge creates the most complete climate risk profile—one that is intentionally created to can actually be used by local decision makers. Our partnerships and comprehensive reports are particularly important for communities experiencing economic hardship as decision makers may not otherwise have the resources to study the infrastructural and social impacts of near-term extreme weather events.

 

Communities for which Woodwell has completed or is preparing municipal risk assessments:

 

When you tell people well, ‘you’ve got to design for conditions in 2070’, they say ‘what does that mean? What kind of storm are we designing for?’ This analysis has given us a better understanding of what kind of disasters we’ll be looking at, and with what frequency, so we have a design target.

Karl Allen, Planner, Chelsea Department of Housing and Community Development

Although the agricultural sector is one of the largest contributors to climate change, there is enormous potential for improved management practices to position agriculture as part of the solution.

Implementing practices that sequester carbon in the soil and recapturing even a fraction of the soil carbon debt accrued over the past 12,000 years would be a significant carbon drawdown strategy. Rebuilding soil carbon stocks is also regarded as a key pillar of improving soil health and long-term agricultural sustainability.

Despite these dual benefits of managing cropland for soil carbon sequestration, farmers’ adoption rates of carbon-storing practices remain very low. Given the high corporate demand for reducing greenhouse gas emissions, a market that can connect buyers with sellers of soil carbon credits could rapidly scale adoption of carbon-friendly agricultural practices. However, a market must have strong and enforceable rules in place to ensure that credits generated are real, additional (emissions reductions would go beyond “business as usual”), and likely to lead to long-term net climate benefits.

Woodwell Climate Research Center is working with agricultural and environmental leaders to identify and close key information gaps to enable effective soil carbon markets.

Our Work

  1. We are systematically identifying key scientific uncertainties in emerging voluntary soil carbon markets. In collaboration with Environmental Defense Fund (EDF), we have surveyed existing voluntary carbon market protocols and found a high level of variability. In a report synthesizing the current unregulated voluntary carbon market, we argued that different methods, protocols, and standards can lead to a wide range in the quality and quantity of credits generated and transacted. In a policy brief in the journal Science, we outlined how a regional approach supported by an independent actor such as the USDA can overcome many of the current challenges these voluntary markets face in producing credible emission reductions.
  2. We are conducting and supporting new scientific research investigating the carbon impact of cover cropping. In collaboration with EDF, the National Corn Growers Association, Iowa Corn Grower’s Association, Iowa Soybean Association, and a cooperative of 18 farmers in Iowa, we are evaluating the net impacts of 5-9 years of winter cover cropping on the quantity and stability of soil carbon. To do this, we are measuring soil carbon and associated soil properties down to one meter across the strip trials these farmers are maintaining on their farms. The goal of this study is to provide an estimate of measured change in soil carbon, to use as a reference for realistic carbon sequestration to compare against modeled estimates.
  3. We are testing soil health indicators to track local, short-term changes indicative of soil carbon gains. Changes in soil carbon can be very small, and hard to measure and detect at the local scale, even when change is appreciable over a region. Because soil organic carbon can take a decade or longer to respond to a change in agricultural practices, measuring soil health properties can help us understand if a system is heading in the right direction in the short term. With EDF’s support, and in collaboration with Corteva Agriscience, we are exploring the spatial patterns of key soil health indicators across dozens of farms in the Midwest that are currently enrolled in the Corteva Carbon Program. Soil health indicators such as soil enzymes, active carbon, and several microbial response parameters will be evaluated for their spatial variance, and will serve as a baseline that can be revisited five years in the future.
  4. We are evaluating emerging soil carbon sequestering technologies. Soil amendments are a broad class of materials that can be added to soils in croplands, pastures, or rangelands to enhance their physical, chemical, or biological characteristics. There are three main ways soil amendments could contribute to climate mitigation: through soil organic carbon sequestration, soil greenhouse gas emission reductions, and life cycle emission reductions. Our research identified that some soil amendments have well established agronomic benefits and clear pathways for climate mitigation. For many newer amendments, including the broad class of biostimulants, there may be great potential, but evidence to date is slim. Increased investment in research is critically needed to establish credible bounds on the climate benefits of many products that are already being marketed to producers.

Impact

Scaling soil carbon sequestration, as with all nature-based climate solutions, requires an all-hands-on-deck approach. This project is filling key knowledge gaps and providing policymakers with shovel-ready solutions to ensure soil carbon markets can succeed in delivering real climate benefits.