Climate Regulatory Services Chapter In Our Giving Earth Book 2009

Climate Regulatory Services Michael Totten, Chief Advisor, Climate, Freshwater & Ecosystem Services Conservation International, [email protected] Chapter in forthcoming 2009 book, Our Giving Earth

Maintaining the Climate that Supports Life Past emissions have already committed the world to at least 1° C of warming—sufficient to dramatically alter the planet as we know it. The expected temperature increase of 2° to 3° has not been reached in three million years, when sea level was 25 to 35 meters higher than today (Hansen et al., 2007). However, the most recent climate research indicates that allowing a doubling to 550 parts per million (ppm) of carbon dioxide (CO2) poses a high probability of a 6° Celsius temperature rise (Hansen et al., 2008). If humanity wants to avert catastrophic, irreversible climate disasters, it needs to stabilize atmospheric concentrations below 350 ppm (Hansen et al., 2007; Mathews and Caldeira, 2008). The new insight that society must achieve a CO2 amount less than the current level is a dramatic change from previous studies, which even most recently suggested that the dangerous level of CO2 was likely to be 450 ppm or higher. The downward change is caused by realization that “slow” feedback processes not included in most climate models—such as ice melt and release of greenhouse gases (GHGs) by the soil, permafrost, and ocean in a warming climate—can occur both remarkably quickly (such as the sudden release of methane from melting permafrost) and on the time scale of decades and centuries. This realization derives from both new paleoclimate data and ongoing observations of global change, especially in the Polar Regions (Hansen et al., 2008; Hansen et al., 2007). Research connecting a rich diversity of disciplines and knowledge domains—notably in earth systems sciences, complex adaptive systems, and ecosystem sciences—is resulting in a veritable flood of critical insights (Canadell et al., 2007; IPCC, 2007; MEA, 2005; Gunderson and Holling, 2001). Among the most impressive and important advancements in this regard have been in understanding the climate regulatory system and the myriad climate regulatory services resulting from the interactions of energy, materials, and information flows through the geosphere, biosphere, and atmosphere. These climate regulatory services ensure sustained well-being for humanity and life on Earth (Schellnhuber et al., 2006). Humanity’s vast infrastructure—now valued in hundreds of trillions of dollars in financial, physical, social, and natural capital assets—depends immensely on the stable sea level of the past several thousand years, the recurring seasonal hydrological cycles and terrestrial rain patterns, the regularity of annual temperature cycles, vegetation patterns, soil conditions and pollination systems, and the plentitude of other processes spawned by the diverse climatically adapted natural ecosystems comprising the biosphere. The Climate Regulatory System

The multitude of recurring values and benefits from key components comprising the climate regulatory system cover a vast range of spatial and temporal scales (Steffen et al., 2005; Archer, 2008; Walker and Salt, 2006), and tremendous strides are being made in mapping and modeling the climate system over time. Paleoclimate findings indicate that relatively benign climate conditions enabled Homo sapiens to become settled farmers, leading to the dawn of civilization. Indeed, civilization’s rapidly evolving and expanding infrastructure and societal growth patterns were adapted to the climate zones of the postglacial Holocene epoch over the past 10,000 to 12,000 years. The Holocene epoch, however, is now being superseded by what some are calling the Anthropocene, in recognition of the planetary impacts the human era is triggering, including changes to Earth’s climate regulatory services (Zalasiewicz et al., 2008; Crutzen, 2002). A key indicator of this dramatic shift is “270 CO2e ppmv,” the atmospheric concentration level of radiatively active trace gases (commonly known as GHGs) over the past 10,000 years. The atmospheric global warming potential of these various gases are standardized to CO2 equivalents in ppm volume given that CO2 is the dominant gas (after water vapor). GHGs are essential to maintaining the Earth’s temperature. Although comprising less than 4/10,000th of one percent of total atmospheric gases (99% of which is comprised of nitrogen and oxygen), without them the planet would be uninhabitable by the life forms we recognize. In the absence of the greenhouse effect and an atmosphere, the Earth’s average surface temperature of 14 °C could be as low as −18 °C. However, humanity’s consumption of fossil fuels and deforestation over the past two centuries have been steadily increasing the atmospheric concentration of CO2e, to roughly 385 ppmv by 2008. Economic projections and business-as-usual development patterns this century would emit several trillion more tons of CO2, pushing the concentration level towards 1000 ppmv and triggering catastrophic consequences. The world’s marine phytoplankton, terrestrial forests, vegetation, and soils are major players in the carbon cycle. Compared to the 700 billion tons of carbon in the atmosphere, several times this amount is stored in forests, vegetation, and soils, and fifty times more in the ocean. The top 100 meters of ocean contain thousands of microscopic photosynthesizing phytoplankton in each drop of water. These microscopic organisms absorb light energy and CO2, and convert this into organic molecules for driving their metabolism and creating cellular structures. Through their rapid life-cycle process, marine phytoplankton transfer more than 100 million tons of carbon per day from the atmosphere and upper ocean to the deep sea and ocean sediments, accounting for half of the global biological uptake of CO2. This “biological pump” effectively removes the heat-trapping CO2 from the atmosphere for centuries to millions of years (Falkowski, 2002). Regulating GHGs is also one of the most significant ecosystem services provided by forests and soils today. The world’s four billion hectares of forests, roughly 30 percent of them mature, old-growth forests, store an estimated 638 Petagrams (Pg, billion metric tons) of carbon—roughly half in biomass and deadwood and half in soils and litter to a

depth of 30 centimeters (FAO, 2006). The soil carbon in northern peatlands and permafrost, which only a few years ago were estimated to be 850 Pg, is now thought to be double that. Lowland tropical peatlands contain upwards of 100 Pg of carbon deposits as deep as 20 meters (Canadell et al., 2007). How Much Is the Climate Regulating System Worth? In a seminal assessment that calculated the annual value of global ecosystem services and natural capital (Costanza et al., 1997a), the value of gas and climate regulatory services provided by the world’s forests, mangroves, wetlands, grasslands, peatlands, and marine phytoplankton were conservatively estimated in 2008 dollars at roughly US$3 trillion per year. The climate service values are based on a marginal cost of carbon mitigation at roughly US$8 per ton of CO2. These are partial valuations, given that the marginal valuation methods may “dramatically underestimate the economic value of total forest climate control services” (Costanza et al., 1997b). Human activity is undermining the value of these climate services in direct and indirect ways. Directly, the deforestation of roughly 14 million hectares per year, the vast majority of it in the tropics, emits between five and eight billion tons of CO2 into the atmosphere (IPCC, 2007). This is roughly 20 percent of total global annual CO2 emissions, more than is released by the world’s fleet of vehicles, trucks, railroads, airplanes, and ships combined. Carbon emissions from tropical deforestation and forest degradation, if not prevented, are expected to increase atmospheric CO2 concentration by as much as 129 ppm in the decades ahead (Stern, 2006). Indirectly, human-triggered CO2 emissions are acidifying the oceans, reducing the ability of marine phytoplankton to absorb CO2 (Doney, 2006; Behrenfeld et al., 2006). Higher temperatures are increasing the frequency and severity of wildfires, droughts, and pest attacks and accelerating the mortality of millions of hectares of forests and the erosion of soil carbon (Westerling et al., 2006; Page et al., 2002; Schimel and Baker, 2002; Lal, 2005). Economists debate which valuation methodology is most appropriate to use in determining planetary welfare and the social cost of carbon (e.g., marginal abatement cost or marginal damage cost). The difference between the low and high cost estimates can be more than two orders of magnitude (i.e., from several dollars to several hundred dollars per ton of CO2). The lower marginal social cost estimates result from using a narrower frame of reference that tends to minimize or exclude non-market damages, equity concerns, and non-marginal damages (e.g., value of life or impacts on economies beyond their ability to cope effectively with climatic perturbations) (Downing and Watkiss, 2002). More fundamental, however, is that while cost-benefit analyses (CBAs) producing marginal cost estimates provide useful rankings of the cost-effectiveness and risk profiles for a range of mitigation options, they do not consider long-term catastrophic impacts occurring over multi-century and multi-millennia timeframes. A significant fraction of CO2 emissions remain in the atmosphere and accumulate over geological time spans of

tens to hundreds of thousands of years, raising the lurid, but real threat of extinction of most life on Earth. From this vantage point, CBAs are “especially and unusually misleading,” and a more illuminating and constructive analysis would be determining the level of “catastrophe insurance” needed: “rough comparisons could perhaps be made with the potentially huge payoffs, small probabilities, and significant costs involved in countering terrorism, building anti-ballistic missile shields, or neutralizing hostile dictatorships possibly harboring weapons of mass destruction… A crude natural metric for calibrating cost estimates of climate-change environmental-insurance policies might be that the U.S. already spends approximately 3% of national income on the cost of a clean environment” (Weitzman, 2008). Getting Our Climate Back Ultimately, climate stabilization at any level can only be achieved if net global CO2 emissions decline to the level of persistent natural sinks (i.e., absorption by forests, soils, and marine phytoplankton). This amounts to about one Pg of carbon per year, or just a few percent of today’s emissions (House et al., 2008). This poses a challenge unprecedented in human history: essentially growing the current $40 trillion annual global economy by two to three percent per year while swiftly moving to near zero emissions, while also phasing out existing coal plants (which annually emit 11 Pg CO2) and halting global deforestation (which annually emits 5 to 8 Pg CO2). Several decades of evidence-based results by individuals, communities, cities, states, and nations around the world have demonstrated best practices, policies, and regulations for improving human welfare without increasing GHGs. Herculean as it may seem, if these efforts were expanded to a global scale in the coming several decades, it would be possible to defuse the time bomb of climate catastrophe. And, quite to the contrary of pessimistic arguments that this would cripple economic growth, taking advantage of the immense pool of cost-effective options for reducing and preventing CO2 emissions while growing a “greener” economy offers the best hope of simultaneously resolving two other unprecedented challenges of global and historical magnitude: more absolute poor than any time in human history and the sixth-largest species extinction spasm in the history of life on Earth (Mittermeier et al., 2008; McKinsey, 2007; Eliasch, 2008; Strassburg et al., 2008). References Archer, D. 2008. The Long Thaw, How Humans Are Changing the Next 100,000 Years of Earth’s Climate. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Behrenfeld, M. J., R.T. O’Malley, D.A. Siegel, C.R. McClain, J.L. Sarmiento, G.C. Feldman, A.J. Milligan, P.G. Falkowski, R.M. Letelier, and E.S. Boss. 2006. Climatedriven trends in contemporary ocean productivity. Nature. 444:752-755. Canadell, J. G., D. Pataki, R. Gifford, R. Houghton, Y. Luo, M. Raupach, P. Smith, and W. Steffen. 2007. Saturation of the Terrestrial Carbon Sink. Terrestrial Ecosystems in a Changing World. Canadell J.G., D. Pataki, L. Pitelka, eds. The IGBP Series. Berlin:

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