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Reforestation Boosts Biodiversity Where Other Carbon Capture Methods Fall Short, Study Finds

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28 Jan, 2025

This post was originally published on Eco Watch

As CO2 emissions continue to rise year after year, capturing and storing carbon is essential to keeping global warming below 1.5°C. However, not all carbon capture methods are created equal, with some perhaps doing more harm than good for biodiversity.

A new study published Thursday which modeled three prominent land-based carbon capture and storage (CCS) strategies found that reforestation is the only option that, along with effectively sequestering carbon, actively boosts biodiversity rather than potentially harms it.

The three CCS strategies analyzed were reforestation, the practice of restoring native trees on previously deforested or damaged land to sequester carbon; afforestation, adding trees where there were previously none; and bioenergy cropping, raising fast-growing crops — which sequester carbon as they grow — to burn for energy while collecting any emissions released in the process.

“Of the strategies we modeled… we found that all three strategies have the potential to benefit biodiversity by helping to mitigate climate change,” Jeffrey Smith, lead author and researcher at Princeton University told EcoWatch on a video call.  

However, he added, “In the case of afforestation and bioenergy cropping, we found that even if we account for the benefits they provide to biodiversity by helping to mitigate climate change, that wasn’t enough to outweigh the harms that they caused biodiversity by driving the loss of habitat.”

Reforestation efforts on the Dillenberg in Taunus, Germany on March 9, 2023. Sebastian Gollnow / picture alliance via Getty Images

Bioenergy cropping requires razing land for crop growth which destroys part of an ecosystem. And it’s the transformation from natural ecosystems to agricultural plots that’s been the single largest driving factor of biodiversity worldwide, he said.

For afforestation, which may be feasible in savannahs, for example, Smith says that artificially placing trees could hinder the ecosystem by interfering with certain interactions, like those between shrub and herbivore species and frequent fires that burn across the landscape in an open ecosystem. “If you convert one of these savannahs to, say, a forest, you’re actually taking away habitat from lions and ostriches and things like that,” Smith said.

On the other hand, the authors found that reforestation provided a win-win by both capturing carbon and restoring vital parts of ecosystems that many species rely on.

The researchers, using data from the Global Biodiversity Information Facility and International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), created statistical computer models tracking the species distribution and habitat affinities of more than 14,000 vertebrate species across different parts of the globe across potential climate conditions.

They then paired that model with data from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project, an enormous collaborative global project that models Earth’s climate conditions, for the research.

“To me, it seems like a fairly intensive amount of computational and data power that goes into this,” Smith said. “And so for example, the model takes a day to run, but it runs on one hundred computers simultaneously.”

“Addressing climate change is going to have to start with large-scale transformations to the energy production system. There’s sort of no way around that, and no way are these land-based mitigation strategies going to fix climate change. It’s going to require us to reduce our reliance on fossil fuels, increase energy efficiency, and fundamentally transition the energy system,” he added. “That said, the thing that’s interesting about these strategies is they actually allow us to sort of reverse past emissions.”

However, we may not have the luxury of always choosing climate mitigation practices that maximize biodiversity. “People are dying from climate change because of flooding in Pakistan and all of these different places around the world, and so there might be reasonable expectations that maybe we should be addressing climate change more aggressively, even if that is not the optimal thing to do from a biodiversity perspective,” Smith said.

An earlier study published in the journal Nature Climate Change from September 2024 found that an enormous investment in CCS is required to meet the Paris Agreement’s goal of keeping global warming under 2°C, and that even with such an investment, meeting the 1.5°C goal is unlikely. 

Smith said he and his colleagues hope to continue this research, citing questions on how different taxonomic groups might respond to different scenarios and “expanding out to other potentially significant ways humans might change the landscape to address climate change… We didn’t model wind and solar panels, but those are two things that we’re going to have to use to help address climate change, and they’re likely going to affect biodiversity in a fairly meaningful way,” he added.

The post Reforestation Boosts Biodiversity Where Other Carbon Capture Methods Fall Short, Study Finds appeared first on EcoWatch.

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An EPD is a standardised document that provides detailed information about the environmental impact of a product throughout its life cycle. Based on a comprehensive Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) study, the EPD highlights ABB’s commitment to transparency, environmental responsibility and supporting customers in making informed decisions on sustainability in their supply chains.

ABB analysed the environmental impact of a ring motor across its entire life cycle from supply chain and production to usage and end-of-life disposal. The study was conducted for a ring motor of a semi-autogenous grinding (SAG) mill with an installed power of 24 MW and was based on a reference service life of 25 years.

“Sustainability is at the core of our purpose at ABB, influencing how we operate and innovate for customers,” said Andrea Quinta, Sustainability Specialist at ABB. “By earning the Environmental Product Declaration for our ring motor, we emphasise our environmental stewardship and industry leadership for this technology. We adhered to the highest standards throughout this process, as we do in the ABB Ring Motor factory every day. This recognition highlights to the mining industry what they are bringing into their own operations when they work with ABB.”

The comprehensive LCA was conducted at ABB’s factory in Bilbao, Spain, and was externally verified and published in accordance with international standards ISO 14025 and ISO 14040/14044. It will remain valid for five years.

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The full EPD for the ABB GMD Ring Motor can be viewed on EPD International.

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