UN forest accounting loophole allows CO2 underreporting by EU, UK, US

Pine forests throughout the southeastern US, especially in North Carolina, are farmed, pulped and turned into wood pellets that are shipped overseas. Photo on Visualhunt.com For the past ten years, Mary Booth, an ecologist with the Partnership for Policy Integrity in Pelham, Massachusetts, has immersed herself in the complex, nuanced, politically charged world of international carbon emissions accounting models as if the planet’s fate depends on it. In many ways, it does. Booth studies how countries count and report their emissions. In particular, she evaluates whether generating energy via the burning of wood pellets, or biomass, puts less carbon into the atmosphere than burning coal. In a rising trend, countries, especially in the European Union and United Kingdom, are converting existing coal-fired power plants to burn wood — a renewable, albeit controversial, fuel source. Emissions accounting helps determine whether or not nations are on target to achieve their voluntary Paris Agreement reduction goals. That agreement also represents the global community’s pledge to keep the world from heating up by just 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) by 2100 from a 1900 baseline (we’ve already warmed 1 degree Celsius). Emissions tallies are reported regularly to the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, or IPCC. But those figures aren’t just numbers on paper or political aspirations. The data, if accurately calculated, tell us how much greenhouse gas nations are actually putting into the air, and those combined totals help us know whether we are on target to avert climate change catastrophe.…

from Conservation news https://ift.tt/2HR3XBG
via IFTTT