Incentives For Carbon Sequestration May Not Protect Species

Paying rural landowners in Oregon’s Willamette Basin to protect at-risk animals won’t necessarily mean that their newly conserved trees and plants will absorb more carbon from the atmosphere and vice versa, a new study has found.

The study, to be published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, analyzed hypothetical payments that were given to landowners to voluntarily take their acreage out of production for conservation. Scenarios conserving different types of land were also developed. The study then examined the relationship between the absorption of carbon, a contributor to global warming, by trees and plants and the protection of 37 different types of animals under each of these scenarios and payment schemes.

“The main thing we found is that if you want to conserve species, that policy might not be compatible with carbon sequestration,” said co-author Andrew Plantinga, a professor in the Department of Agricultural and Resource Economics at Oregon State University. “On the other hand, if you want to get carbon out of the atmosphere, it’s not clear that will be good for species.”

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Tagged as: Animals, Carbon, Carbon Sequestration, Conservation, Global Warming, National Academy of Sciences, Oregon, Oregon State University, Plants, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Threatened Species, Trees, Willamette Basin