As Earth’s climate warms, mangroves are expanding north and south from tropical zones. Mangroves reinforce shorelines and store huge quantities of carbon, so protecting them is an effective climate strategy.
It’s crucial to know the relationship between biodiversity and carbon storage to assess whether carbon-focused conservation will also protect the most biodiverse forests.
A coolabah forest in Western Australia – one of the world’s previously unrecognised dryland forests.
TERN Ausplots
A new survey has identified millions of hectares of forest in dryland areas, a finding that boosts the total global forest cover by 9% and has significant consequences for carbon budgets.
Plants absorb carbon and store it in the land.
Blue mountains image from www.shutterstock.com
A new bid to boost the amount of carbon stored in the world’s soils has been launched at the Paris climate summit.
Mangroves are still be cleared for aquaculture expansion. Since 1989, 6600 hectares of Tanjung Panjang Nature Reserve’s original 13,300 ha of mangroves have been converted.
Iona Soulsby
Mangroves, hectare for hectare, store more carbon than any other forests. But they are also among the most threatened. New projects in Indonesia show how mangroves might be restored.
Lush rainforest above ground… spare a thought for what’s happening in the soil.
Tim Mowrer
It’s no exaggeration to say the tropics drive our planet’s carbon cycle – the constant transfer of carbon back and forth, on a global scale, between living things and the environment. Understanding the…
Rabbits can strip grasslands bare and chew through young woody trees.
John Schilling/Flickr
On Christmas Day 1859, the Victoria Acclimatisation Society released 24 rabbits for hunting, to help settlers feel more at home. Given the millions of dollars in damage to agricultural productivity that…
Coal seam gas is only one issue for managing one of Australia’s most important geological resources.
AAP Image/Dean Lewins
Sara Bice, The University of Melbourne; Mike Sandiford, The University of Melbourne, and Will Howard, The University of Melbourne
In a recent article on The Conversation, Queensland coal seam gas (CSG) researchers argued that the industry is progressing faster than the science, leading to concerns over fugitive emissions and impacts…
Greg Hunt (left) says he doesn’t want an emissions trading scheme; Clive Palmer says he does. But Hunt’s Direct Action plan might ultimately take us there anyway.
AAP Image/Alan Porritt
There’s little point in getting too excited just yet about the details of Direct Action and its merits (or otherwise) as compared with emissions trading. Why? Because all of the current debate about Australia’s…
Melt pond on the Greenland ice sheet.
NASA / Michael Studinger
The concept of a “tipping point” – a threshold beyond which a system shifts to a new state – is becoming a familiar one in discussions of the climate. Examples of tipping points are everywhere: a glass…
The swollen Fitzroy River in Queensland, Australia, where heavy rains in early 2011 led to extraordinary regrowth with a global impact.
Capt. W. M. & Tatters/Flickr
Record-breaking rains triggered so much new growth across Australia that the continent turned into a giant green carbon sink to rival tropical rainforests including the Amazon, our new research shows…
Fire is one of the reasons tall trees struggle in the heat.
Valley_Guy/Flickr
Clearing forests is one of the major contributors to carbon dioxide emissions — something we’ll need to keep in check if we’re to have any hope of mitigating climate change. Recent research suggested that…
Large trees don’t slow down with age.
Michelle Venter
Large, older trees have been found to grow faster and absorb carbon dioxide more rapidly than younger, smaller trees, despite the previous view that trees’ growth slowed as they developed. Research published…
Managing Director, Triple Helix Consulting; Chief Executive Officer, Australian Centre for International Agricultural Research; Professorial Fellow, ANU Fenner School for the Environment and Society, Australian National University