Following the landmark 2015 United Nations Paris Agreement, a growing number of countries are committing to the transition to net-zero emissions. Carbon capture and storage (CCS) has been consistently heralded to directly address emissions from the energy and industrial sectors and forms a significant component of plans to reach net-zero. However, despite the critical importance of the technology and substantial research and development to date, CCS deployment has been slow. This review examines deployment efforts over the last decade.
Global climate change and land degradation are two grand changes facing humanity. In this perspective, we examine how degraded and abandoned farmland can be harnessed to fight climate change. Building upon and extending natural climate solutions, we suggest that the carbon capture and storage of abandoned farmland can be accelerated and maximized through restoring the diversity of plant species, applying biochar to soil, and co-developing renewable energy such as solar power. The benefits of these approaches extend far beyond climate-change mitigation and land restoration.
The Paris Agreement to keep global temperature increase to well-below 2 °C and to pursue efforts to limit it to 1.5 °C requires to formulate ambitious climate-change mitigation scenarios to reduce CO2 emissions and to enhance carbon sequestration. These scenarios likely require significant land-use change. Failing to mitigate climate change will result in an unprecedented warming with significant biodiversity loss. The mitigation potential on land is high. However, how land-based mitigation options potentially affect biodiversity is poorly understood.
Although numbers are still low compared to cattle rearing, intensive dairy goat farms have been widely spreading in the Italian livestock systems. Since goats are quite rustic, they can easily adapt to different management practices; however, improving the efficiency can make the difference, both in productivity and on the environmental impact attributed to goat milk production. In the present study, the Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) approach was used to quantify the potential environmental impact of goat milk production system in 17 farms in Lombardy (Northern Italy).
At the 21st session of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC, COP21), a voluntary action plan, the ‘4 per 1000 Initiative: Soils for Food Security and Climate’ was proposed under the Agenda for Action. The Initiative underlines the role of soil organic matter (SOM) in addressing the three-fold challenge of food and nutritional security, adaptation to climate change and mitigation of human-induced greenhouse gases (GHGs) emissions. It sets an ambitious aspirational target of a 4 per 1000 (i.e.
Energy geotechnics involves the use of geotechnical principles to understand and engineer the coupled thermo-hydro-chemo-mechanical processes encountered in collecting, exchanging, storing, and protecting energy resources in the subsurface. In addition to research on these fundamental coupled processes and characterization of relevant material properties, applied research is being performed to develop analytical tools for the design and analysis of different geo-energy applications.
Effective implementation of rules on reduced emission from avoided deforestation and forest degradation (REDD. +) depends on the compatibility between these rules and existing sectoral policies associated with forests. This paper applies content analysis of policy documents, semi-structured interviews and case study analysis to examine the interplay between REDD. + rules and Kenyan sectorial policies and local socioeconomic settings. Results reveal that the preparation of national REDD.
Recent research on CO2 capture is focusing on the optimization of CO2 absorption using amines (mainly monoethanolamine-MEA) in order to minimize the energy consumption of this very energy-intensive process and improve the absorption efficiency. Process optimization is always required and this research is worth and necessary. However, the main concern arises when thinking of the overall process: solvent production, solvent use and regeneration, and environmental effects related to its use/emissions.
