Breakthrough Strategies & Solutions has released a report based on their conference ‘Sequestering Carbon in Soil:  Addressing the Climate Threat’ held in May 2017. 

In this opinion piece, Edward Parson of the Emmett Institute on Climate Change and the Environment, UCLA, argues that Climate Engineering (CE) must urgently be given greater and more serious consideration within climate change research and policy, and calls upon the IPCC to take responsibility for this.

This paper discusses EU climate and agriculture policy instruments and analyses how these can motivate farmers to adopt soil carbon sequestration projects. 

This paper takes countries’ mitigation targets (Intended National Determined Contributions, or INDCs), submitted since the Paris Climate agreement, and, using supplementary information from other official documents, quantifies how much of the promised actions are related to Land Use, Land Use Change and Forestry (LULUCF, primarily deforestation and forest management). 

This paper by researchers in Germany explores the scalability of managed woody and herbaceous bioenergy plantations (BP) for terrestrial capture of atmospheric carbon. The researchers make simulations to quantitatively explore how much land area could be made available globally for this terrestrial carbon dioxide removal (tCDR) strategy. 

What is the latest science on soil's ability to pull carbon pollution out of the atmosphere? Breakthrough Strategies hosted a webinar on April 24 on the Technical Potential of Soil Carbon Sequestration. It featured three of the world’s leading experts on strategies for drawing carbon pollution out of the atmosphere and storing it in soils: Keith Paustian, Jean-François Soussana, and Eric Toensmeier.

This research brings together data from 389 field trials to determine how the root and shoot biomass, and carbon (C) stocks of major crops correlate to soil C in different environmental conditions. The analysis found all crops allocated more C to their shoots than roots. The greatest C allocation to roots was in grasses (which also had the highest plant biomass production).

This paper, published in the journal Science, aims to establish a detailed “roadmap” for meeting the Paris climate goal. It provides not only a scenario for the CO2 emissions reductions needed but places attention on the many different policy actions needed to stay below 2°C warming. One of three main focus areas is agriculture and land use related emissions.