Farmer here. Planted about 1,000 native trees this year in our home-grown revegetation project, and going to spend the next 2 years making sure as many of them as possible don't die.
No govt subsidies or anything. Our own $ and our own work. Nobody will do it, nobody will pay to do it, so we do.
Peatland takes centuries to develop and store that carbon though.
If we want to achieve this sort of thing, we'd need to manufacture peat and store that underwater. Possible but when we make more, we usually destroy the planet more too. I'm not sure we'd offset it.
"The best time to plant a tree is twenty years ago. The second best is today."
For the short-term, planting rice differently can reduce methane emissions substantially. In the short-term, methane is much worse. In the long run, methane breaks down to carbon which persists.
If we want to reverse climate change, we need to restore nature's ability to sink that carbon.
No argument that rice can be grown better, but going back to your call for increasing wetland, isn't it the wet that makes soil produce methane? In the same way that the flooding causes rice paddy soil to create methane, and drying it out (per your study) arrests the process.
With 20-30% of atmospheric methane coming from wetlands, while they may ultimately sink more carbon into themselves, the process seems too inefficient, trading CO2 for some CH4.
Forestry produces a much healthier mix of gasses. On its own it's not a quick sink but when you manage it, and extract timber and end up sinking tonnes of carbon into your buildings. The trees consume CO2 to photosynthesis and aerobic bacteria in open forests consume CH4. Seems like a win-win.
Peatlands cover 3 percent of the earth and hold 30 percent of stored carbon. As a quick and dirty guesstimate, if you multiply that by a 6.66 to replace the lost 85 percent, you get 20 percent of the surface and 200 percent of current carbon stores.
It seems likely that a notable percentage of global warming is due to wetlands loss, not just industrialization.
So far, I haven't managed to do a deeper analysis with hard numbers. Feel free to do a write up if you think you know enough about the topic. I'm sure I'm not the only one who would be interested.
I'm just trying to point out a couple of issues in your logic.
You cannot multiply wetland. It takes a thousand years to get a 10m deep peat bog and every second of its wet, rotting existence creates CH4. Wetlands offer lots of benefits —nature, water management, etc— but greenhouse gasses really aren't one.
More importantly you're only comparing standing volumes of carbon. We extract billions of m³ of lumber out of forests each year. Even the process of growing it, is far better. Methane is being consumed, not created.
The overall picture is complex but if we're thinking about things in the short term, farming lumber (and using less concrete, brick) would do far more good than creating wetland.
Even worse, not only are you not paid to do it, you are paid NOT to do it. I have a few acres of land in Ireland (not a lot, admittedly!) and rewilding it means it is no longer eligible for agricultural subsidies. The government effectively pays you to destroy biodiversity with beef.
Okay, we have a small farm in the Great Southern Region of Western Australia. A large chunk of it was cleared for cattle and is kikyu/gass pasture, and we still run a small herd of 8 head. But we're very lucky to have about 3/4s of our land well preserved bushland.
The first thing we did when we bought the place was to plant several broad wind-breaks and shelter-belts with native species in the pasture, forming "corridors". Over the years we've added more -- revegetating the road-verge and encouraging the stuff already there to grow back. We've also planted hedgerows of some other trees that aren't native, but are stock fodder, and the birds and insects love them.
We plant a variety of eucalyptus species, acacias, sheoaks, and a number of melaleuca's and various bushes and shrubs.
This year we enlarged two of our large shelter-belts, extended several of our shade-clumps, and did an ambitious amount of planting along the road verge (which hopefully won't be shredded by the council next time they come along).
It's a drop in the ocean, but it's local, it's something concrete that we can do beyond the rather ridiculous appeasement of separating the recyclables.
Some of the trees we plant will outlive us, and I love that.
In some areas the climate change is creating too much “wetland” which poses a different set of issues. We’ve had record amounts of rain here in Denmark, and the local farmers should probably look into farming rice, or maybe seaweed, if it continues. Which it probably will since the records we broke were set in 2019, which in term broke records set one of the years before that and so on.
Looking at the graphs, however, we should go back to covid society, well, without all the dying. That basically put us on a better track than what we need for almost two years.
I’m optimistic though. This year alone has been a massive impact on the global economy in terms of climate costs. Which in term have our local politicians actually talking about solutions. Many of them are focused on being better prepared, but some of them are also waking up to the fact that large parts of our country will be basically inhabitable unless something is done. Not sure why it took them 50 years to get there, but it is what it is.
> Looking at the graphs, however, we should go back to covid society, well, without all the dying.
With the dying you save the environment way faster. "We should go back to covid society" just means let's all be ascetic monks. There's too many people in the world. We don't need more wetlands or this or that, we just need to understand that a population that grows without limits always destroys itself, that's all.
What's the point of a planet with billions of people if their lives suck and they have to stay home using their CO2 quotas? Much better to have less people living normally.
Since I rarely get to talk to Malthusians: Do you have a preferred approach for population reduction?
Tangential point: You severely underestimate the impact of scale and specialization on our standard of living. There is no way we could the same variety of nice things at 500million people
It's happening already, I'd just not create incentive programs to boost birthrates. I don't like to take a very heavy handed way to "control" society, think it's better to just let some things happen the way they happen, because if I'm wrong at least I didn't go full on. But the most developed / educated countries are already going down fast except for immigration. Once the countries immigrants come from rise to the same economic levels, I would predict their birth rates would also go down.
To your tangential point: I think technological development will allow less and less people needed on the supply chain to sustain the same quality of life for society. I think this is clear from history and it only goes in one direction.
I'm aware there's people that defend more extreme views like boosting abortions or other dystopian measures. I don't believe in any of those, I think everyone should have the right to reproduce if they feel like it, I'd just rather it be an informed decision, but I wouldn't add any control measures for fear of abusive mis-use by the government later on.
We'd need a human beings cap in millions to have a lavish lifestyle with managable consequences to environment. And probably in low hundrends. And even then if everybody lived like a king we'd be fucked.
I'd also say that more asceticism would produce a healthier society. Current western consumerist society isn't healthy for anybody. Neither the planet, nor humans.
Been donating to Ducks Unlimited here in the US for years. Their angle is to protect the hunting pastime, but to that end involves getting involved with many states' local issues to keep the wetlands protected.
(Ah, hark, I hear crickets chirping.)