In September 2008, Feasta, the Foundation for the Economics of Sustainability was awarded multi-annual funding from the Irish Department of the Environment for two policy research projects. This website documents the development of Carbon Cycles and Sinks project.
The purpose of this Carbon Cycles and Sinks project is to develop policies which will enable the Irish land mass to become a carbon sink rather than a source of greenhouse emissions. This project will be led by Richard Douthwaite, and Corinna Byrne has been hired as project coordinator and lead researcher.
The core areas being examined by the CCSN include:
1. The best management practices and technologies to reduce or eliminate the release of greenhouse gas emissions from damaged peat bogs. CCSN will develop policies to incentivise the effective protection of intact bogland; the restoration of cut-over bogs to functioning bogland where possible, and if not possible, to investigate ways to retain their remaining organic carbom while producing renewable energy and/or food crops.
2. The best management practices to increase the carbon content of forests, hedgerows, scrub, arable and pasture land. The arable section work will include the use of Biochar. We will try to devise systems which reward those who increase the carbon content of their land and penalize those whose land loses carbon.
3. The 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 practises.
4. Study of the greenhouse gas emissions from slurry storage and ways of reducing them by adopting technologies such as anaerobic digestion to capture methane for energy and organic fertilizer.
5. The best ways of measuring soil carbon, establishing a baseline for later comparison with various agricultural practices or additions of amendments such as compost, biochar and/or microbial innoculations.
The second policy research project is about Smart Taxes.