UN: "Nature kicks carbon capture's butt"

The United Nations Environment Programme released a report last Friday for World Environment Day titled "The Natural Fix? The Role of Ecosystems in Climate Mitigation." In it, UNEP makes the case for investing in protecting fragile ecosystems as a form of carbon mitigation instead of carbon capture and storage technology. The report highlights the ways in which nature is better at regulating carbon than CCS through the carbon cycle and how preserving nature's role in carbon regulation will bring greater and cheaper benefits.

The report explains that the priority ecosystems to protect are tropical forests and peatlands. Reducing deforestation by 50 percent by 2050 could prevent the release of 50 gigatonnes of carbon into the atmosphere this century, which meets 12 percent of the emission reduction recommendation by the IPCC. Peatland restoration could prevent the release of up to 0.8 gigatonnes of carbon per year.

The other main area that the report devotes attention to is agriculture. UNEP believes the agriculture sector could be be mostly carbon neutral by 2030 if necessary policies are adopted, therefore preventing the release of 2 gigatonnes of carbon per year.

The report calls for governments to draft carbon management policies that rely more on ecosystem protection and restoration and less on funding CCS technologies, particularly during the upcoming climate convention in Copenhagen.
You can access the full PDF of the report here.