Ecological Internet on the enormous amount of carbon sequestered every day they remain standing
Ecological Internet welcomes the emerging science published today in “Nature” indicating tropical trees in undisturbed forest are absorbing [ark] nearly a fifth of the CO2 released by burning fossil fuels[1]. This is in addition to the long-term carbon sequestered within old trees’ wood and soils. This is the most recent of several major scientific studies indicating the need to fully protect all remaining primary and old growth forests as a keystone response to global climate, biodiversity and water crises.
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“This is huge — not only do ancient rainforests reliably store massive amounts of carbon, as we have known for sometime, but they continue to remove enormous amounts of carbon every day they remain standing and are non-degraded.
The study partially solves the mystery of where human carbon pollution has been going, and in so doing supports the need for avoided deforestation payments,” said Dr. Glen Barry, Ecological Internet’s President. It was found that remaining tropical forests remove a massive 4.8 billion tonnes of CO2 emissions from the atmosphere each year.
This includes a previously unknown carbon sink in Africa, which mops up 1.2 billion tonnes of CO2 a year. Over the past 40 years, each hectare of intact African forest was found to have annually trapped an extra 0.6 tonnes of carbon.
This builds upon last year’s studies that found old-growth forests are “carbon sinks” and continually absorb carbon dioxide, and that their first time logging releases 40 percent of their carbon[2].