Carbon Sinks and Global Climate Change :: Environment Earth Papers

Carbon sinks have been a hot topic surrounding global climate change. To understand this debate it is first essential to understand what carbon sinks are and what they do. Plants have the natural ability to soak up carbon dioxide from atmosphere, storing it as carbon. In relation to global climate change, plants, especially trees, can help to absorb some of the carbon dioxide that humans have emitted into the atmosphere. This becomes one possible solution in mitigating climate change. As with many possible solutions to climate change, there are positive and negative sides of carbon sinks as a mitigation option. There is also quite a divergence of viewpoints between countries. The issue of carbon sinks continues to be debated today. Is this an area in which consensus and cooperation can occur? Unfortunately, this has just been another area in which there has been controversy in global environmental politics. After an in depth look at the negative and positive aspects of carbon sinks i n relation to global climate change, it seems at this time the negative aspects outweigh the positive. Due to scientific uncertainty, an inadequate monitoring and measuring system, as well as a lack of rules and guidelines, the use of carbon sinks will prove to be more of a problem than a solution to the global climate change problem. First of all, what are carbon sinks? The earth contains various natural stocks or reservoirs of carbon. These stocks can be found in the ocean, forests, soils, and the atmosphere. When one of these stocks releases carbon, such as when a forest is reduced by fire, decomposition, or deforestation, it is known as a source of carbon. When these stocks absorb carbon they are called sinks (Sedjo, 4). The ocean can hold the most carbon; it contains about fifty times as much carbon as the atmosphere. Forests and soils contain about 3.5 times as much carbon as the atmosphere (Kolshus, 2). This paper mostly focuses on carbon sinks in forests because it is currently the subject under debate in the climate change regime. Sinks can be used to mitigate global climate change in two ways: either by producing new forests to absorb the carbon, or by preventing the release of carbon into the atmosphere through actions such as deforestation (Pagiola, 25). However, currently there is a lack of consensus as to how much carbon can actually be absorbed by these sinks.