WWU team launches innovative approach to help curb climate change

||| FROM SALISH CURRENT |||

We hear a lot about the evils of carbon. However, carbon got its evil reputation because of what humans do with it. We dig it, pump it, burn it and toss it into our atmosphere. Our oceans, trees and soils are doing their best to take it up, but there is just too much of it in places where it shouldn’t be. Figuring out what to do with excess carbon is the most urgent challenge of our time. 

Earth’s systems operate in delicate balance. Too much carbon, like too much sugar in the body, wreaks havoc on systems, destabilizing them as they try to cope. Excess carbon in the atmosphere is trapping heat and accelerating climate change. That excess heat destabilizes global climate systems such as the jet stream and ocean currents. 

Sound bad? Well, it is. Instead of a steady racetrack of air flowing around the polar regions, the jet stream has developed a periodic wobble that acts something like a teeter-totter, sending frigid air plunging south to Texas and pumping warm, glacier-melting air into the Arctic. This type of unpredictability is one of the many faces of climate change. In our region, climate change can take the form of overtopped dikes during winter storms that inundate farmland, homes underwater during more frequent rainstorms, or damaged restaurants and roads when king tides and storm surges coincide, as in December 2018 in Birch Bay.

Inspired model

Two professors at Western Washington University with a team of graduate fellows, student interns and sustainability professionals are working on one solution to climate change. (With climate change, we need a whole army of solutions!) 

In January 2020, Steve Hollenhorst and Howard Sharfstein, professors at the Huxley College of the Environment at Western, asked, “What if we could protect land, cultivate that land for its carbon storage capacity and harness the power of capital markets to pay for it? And, what if this local solution could be translated to other places around the world?” 

As the founder of the West Virginia Land Trust, Hollenhorst found inspiration for the idea of a Carbon Conservation Trust (CCT) modeled after the land trust movement. Sharfstein brought complementary legal and business expertise to their concept, from his career at Kimberly Clark Corporation. 

During a May 6 presentation of the Huxley Speaker Series, Hollenhorst described how a CCT — applying the easement concept used in land trusts to carbon — could work; Sharfstein explained the legal aspects.

Just like land trusts purchase conservation easements from private property owners, the CCT would purchase easements from willing landowners to protect the carbon resources on and under the land. Hollenhorst pointed to the success of the land trust model: “There are 1,600 land trusts in the U.S. protecting 56 million acres of land — equal to the size of Minnesota — which amounts to nearly 18% of all private land in this country!”

These easements would be voluntary agreements that permanently limit the uses of the land in order to protect its conservation value. Protected land provides a service by storing excess carbon. Without buying the land, a CCT acquires the ability to store carbon on property they don’t own. This gives the landowner income in the form of carbon credits without selling the land but taking on the responsibility to retain and protect the carbon asset. 

The CCT as a governing body would hold the easement in perpetuity and monitor compliance of the carbon storage in that land, Sharfstein said. The CCT would verify that the land is indeed storing carbon and at what rate, and would determine the amount of carbon credit embodied in that land. Legal agreements would be signed with the landowners who retain ownership of the land but have made a commitment to not convert it to a carbon-emitting asset. 

READ FULL ARTICLE: salish-current.org/2021/05/12/community-voices-local-team-launches-innovative-approach-to-help-curb-climate-change/