Here we are. The carbon topic striking again. I guess for those of you following me, it didnt' quite come as a surprise given the recent media attention that carbon credits have gotten, and NOT for a right way. I already wrote a few posts in the past, around why maybe we should thread more carefully on the topic.. For an intro to the carbon market
How calculators work The carbon tax For my take on the greenwashing aspects If you went and read those, you already have an idea on my take If you haven't, well, I suppose you can guess it I don't think they are completely useless ( I would be an hypocrit otherwise, since, well, I have been working towards some of the calculations myself) but I think we must thread very very lightly on this. For example, only recently a new paper came out criticising another paper for calculating carbon sequestration in saltmarsh ecosystems by leaving out some quite considerate pieces of the puzzle. Some of those pieces are complex, but as the title say it is not a question of adding or substracting a number, it is more of a question of understading the processes, and then putting them into equation. You need to be an ecologist but also a biogeochemist and why not a geologist a climatologist and an oceanographer. It goes without saying that one person cannot be all of those five (and maybe more, because you need to be both a microbial, plant and invertebrate ecologist, need to know about recent and past geologica patterns, understand currents, model different forcings of climate scenarios etc...), at least not be all five well (learning is good but feeling very out of one's depth not so...). Collaborations are therefore absolutely necessary, but it's not an easy task, even if one finds different people willing (an able given our current bureocratic situations which often are there to impede these sort of things), these different disciplines talk slightly different languages, work on different temporal and spatial scales.. Reaching 'a number' is therefore very hard, and especially reaching an 'universally applicable number'. Saltmarshes in Venice may look similar to those in England or those in the USA, but their underlying functioning and environmental forcings may be so different that the number may differ in accord. The same applies to forests, to mangrove habitats to seaweed beds, and to all other habitats that are already included in the carbon offset market, with some average number that doesn't really make sense using..
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