Study: conservation for carbon sequestration may not protect species
Read the full post at Biopact.
In this era of climate change, of the need to maintain biodiversity and of the growing reliance on agriculture for the production of energy and renewable materials, land-use choices need ever more careful scrutiny. What happens to species and the carbon cycle when we convert ‘wild’ land to farmland? And vice versa, what are the effects when we pay farmers to take farmland out of production for conservation? A commonly held view is that the conservation of land and the plants that thrive on it, is good for both carbon sequestration and biodiversity. However, a new study shows that this is not necessarily the case. Things are indeed far more complex.
Scientists from a range of U.S. universities built a case study around these questions. They found that paying rural landowners in Oregon’s Willamette Basin to protect at-risk animals won’t necessarily mean that their newly conserved trees and plants will absorb more carbon from the atmosphere, and vice versa.