Soil Carbon: Crucial Ally or Potential Threat to Net-Zero Commitments? | Mongabay

This article refers to the world’s longest-running soil-warming experiment, started in 1991 by MBL's Jerry Mellilo and still running today at Harvard Forest in central Massachusetts. The experiment compares artificially warmed plots with control plots to assess carbon loss from soil. After 26 years, the experiment showed a associated with major reorganizations of the soil microbial community.

The daily destruction of nature’s carbon stores is happening right before our eyes, as forests are ravaged by catastrophic wildfires and vast tracts of wildlands are cleared for agriculture. But even greater stores of carbon lie hidden beneath our feet, and they too are under threat.

The world’s soils are a gigantic carbon sink that has so far played a vital, outsized role in mitigating humanity’s excessive carbon emissions. But climate change, industrialized agriculture and other human activities threaten to degrade global soil carbon storage — maybe dangerously so.

Preserving the ecosystem services of this subterranean environment is crucial to meeting global net zero commitments.

Source: Soil Carbon: Crucial Ally or Potential Threat to Net-Zero Commitments? | Mongabay