Welcome to the Carbon Cycles and Sinks Network! As you know, the network is being established by Feasta, the Foundation for the Economics of Sustainability, with funding from the Department of the Environment because about 27% of this country’s greenhouse emissions come from the land and, unless they can be reduced, more rapid reductions will have to be made in the country’s use of fossil fuels in order to reach EU targets. What the government wants for the money it is giving the Network is evidence-based policy advice on ways in which the emissions of greenhouse gases from land use can be reduced and eventually eliminated. However, the Network can, and should, set additional goals for itself.
Feasta appointed Corinna Byrne as Network Co-ordinator at the end of October. She is based at the Dept. of Chemical & Environmental Sciences at the University of Limerick where she is completing a PhD into the carbon up-take by Irish grassland. She works three days a week and so far has concentrated on identifying the relevant research that has already been done and recruiting the researchers to the network. She will not be confining herself to potential members in Ireland. We want to include everyone, wherever they are in the world, who is doing work that is relevant to Irish conditions.
A list of current members is attached. Please let us know of others to approach. The next step will be to invite the researchers to outline their current interests. These will be posted on the website we are developing with links to their published papers if these are already on the web or, if they are not, direct access to the papers themselves. The website will go live in January. We hope that, amongst other things, it will enable students looking for research topics to identify where the opportunities are.
The what’s-already-been-done survey Corinna is undertaking will enable us to set targets for what the Network might achieve in its first year. At the moment, it looks as though the easiest reduction in emissions that the government might be able to bring about would come from blocking up the drains on bogs that are drying out and oxidising. The Irish Peatland Conservation Council will be publishing a report on this shortly.
Other areas of interest include:
- The collation of information about the best management practices to use to increase the carbon content of forests, hedgerows, scrub and arable and pasture land.
- Best management practices and technologies to reduce nitrous oxide emissions from fertilizer use and the development of policies to substantially reduce nitrous oxides and other gases from tillage land and to reward farmers for using these new practices.
- Reduction of greenhouse gas emissions from slurry storage and looking at reducing them by adopting technologies such as anaerobic digestion to capture methane for energy and organic fertilizer.
- The collation of information about the best ways of measuring soil carbon, establishing a base line for later comparison with various agricultural practices or additions of amendments such as biochar, compost and/or microbial inoculations.
We also intend to investigate whether the way Irish emissions are assessed under UNFCCC rules are, in fact appropriate.
We are planning to hold the first meeting of the network in February. The main business will be to go through the research proposals that Corinna will have circulated by then and get agreement on them. We will also, of course, be looking for volunteers to take some tasks on. We have a little funding for limited desk studies. However, in addition to discussing research priorities, we plan to have one or two research presentations.
Please let me know if you think we are heading in the right direction.
Richard Douthwaite
Project Manager for Feasta
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