Blogs

Into The Anthropocene. The Science of Conservation.

Episode #3: Professor David Beerling, Director of the Leverhulme Centre for Climate Change Mitigation (LC3M), speaks about a potential solution for removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere which may also help rebuild the health of our soils.

Conservation journalist, Byron Pace, speaks with scientists, environmental advocates, conservationists, wildlife managers and a diverse array of global guests, to uncover the complex nature of the world we live. Into The Anthropocene aims to make the science of conservation more accessible, exploring stories and research from the frontline. Only through understanding our world can we improve our decision making and define the Anthropocene for the betterment of humanity and the planet.

On this week’s podcast, an ambitious Mars mission from a young space agency, and how crumbling up rocks could help fight climate change.

Researchers have assessed whether Enhanced Weathering – a technique to pull carbon dioxide out of the air – has the potential to help battle climate change. Research Article: Beerling et al.

Listen in at 12:12

With global greenhouse gas emissions still increasing – and Covid-19 lockdown restrictions merely causing a short-term dip – the challenge of holding global temperature rise to 1.5C above pre-industrial levels is looking ever more formidable.

Achieving this goal looks increasingly unlikely without taking previously emitted CO2 out of the atmosphere – using carbon dioxide removal (CDR) or “negative emissions” techniques.

Hi and welcome to this week’s Fix the Planet. I’ve been chatting to people about a method of carbon-dioxide removal that doesn’t grab the headlines in the way that CO2-absoring machines and tree planting do: scattering pulverised rock over the Earth’s surface. Many rocks naturally absorb CO2, but this doesn’t happen fast enough to avert the sort of dangerous warming we’re headed for.

“Essentially, it’s a natural process that happens anyway in the world, but at a comparatively slow rate,” says Mike Kelland, LC3M PhD Student at the University of Sheffield, UK. Breaking up the rock, a process known as enhanced weathering, increases its surface area and the rate at which CO2 is absorbed.

What policies are needed to implement carbon dioxide removal? Read the latest blog from LC3M Researcher, Dr. Emily Cox at Cardiff University and Neil Edwards, Professor of Earth System Science at the Open University.

“A major concern is that whatever the state of readiness of negative emissions technologies or ‘NETs’, the policy frameworks that would be needed to implement CO₂ removal are almost non-existent. However, as we show in a new paper in Climate Policy (Cox and Edwards 2019), there may be more policies for carbon dioxide removal already in existence than we previously thought.”

Read David Beerling’s blog, with Oxford University Press, on why we actually have to start removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, safely and affordably, within the next 20 years. Drastic phase-down of our carbon dioxide emissions from burning fossil fuels will be insufficient to avoid catastrophic human-caused climate change. Enter, the kingdom of plants…
Hundreds of millions of years ago, plants bioengineered a cooler climate as the spread of forests lowered atmospheric carbon dioxide levels. We now think it may be possible to mimic those processes to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere…

Guest post by Prof David Beerling and Prof Stephen Long to coincide with the Nature Plants paper ‘Farming with crops and rocks to address global climate, food and soil security’, published 19 February 2018. The paper tackles the under-discussed technique of CO2 removal called “enhanced rock weathering” and highlights the potential wider benefits for crop yields and soil health, and sets out a research agenda for the next steps.

Biology Letters has just published a mini-series on “Enhanced rock weathering: biological climate change mitigation with co-benefits for food security”. To coincide with publication, we asked Guest Editor, Professor David J. Beerling FRS, why he commissioned this series and what the research can tell us about the future.