The Biden administration is looking at using wetlands to capture carbon and help meet climate goals. A yellow-headed blackbird, pictured, perches in a wetland near Menoken, N.D. Charlie Riedel/AP Photo
Americans have been draining wetlands for farming and development since Colonial times but climate change may reverse that tide — from destruction to restoration.
Federal scientists are studying whether heat-trapping carbon dioxide can be sucked out of the atmosphere and sequestered in restored salt marshes, sea grass beds and mangrove swamps. And those wetlands can in turn protect communities along the coast from rising seas and fierce, frequent climate-driven storms.
“The concept that’s forming is that what we need to do is massive-scale ecosystem restoration as soon as possible to begin absorbing as much carbon dioxide as we can and diminish the amount of overshoot that we have in atmospheric greenhouse gases this century,” said Kevin Kroeger, a research chemist at the U.S. Geological Survey’s Woods Hole Coastal and Marine Science Center.
Across the Lower 48 states, wetlands hold at least 3.2 billion metric tons of CO2 equivalent, by one estimate — roughly half the country’s net total greenhouse gas emissions in 2019.
That may sound good, but there are many questions that need answers.
Scientists know which types of wetlands sequester the most CO2, but there’s no comprehensive map of degraded wetlands or prospectus on what their restoration would mean for efforts to sequester greenhouse gases.
Kroeger and his team of nine researchers are looking for those answers. At the Biden administration’s behest, the scientists recently estimated the potential for national-scale carbon management in tidal wetlands.
The researchers found that conserving existing wetlands, restoring 35 percent of marshes that have been impounded or drained, and allowing coastal wetlands to naturally migrate toward land as sea levels rise could create a substantial sink for CO2 and human-caused methane by 2050 - link - Hannah Northey - link - more like this - link
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