(Jeremy Hance, mongabay.com, 12 November 2009) -- A new report states that boreal forests store nearly twice as much carbon as tropical forests per hectare: a fact which researchers say should make the conservation of boreal forests as important as tropical in climate change negotiations. The report from the Canadian Boreal Initiative and the Boreal Songbird Initiative, entitled The Carbon the World Forgot, estimates that the boreal forest—which survives in massive swathes across Alaska, Canada, Northern Europe, and Russia—stores 22 percent of all carbon on the earth's land surface. According to the study the boreal contains 703 gigatons of carbon, while the world's tropical forests contain 375 gigatons.

"Past accounting greatly underestimated the amount and depth of carbon stored in and under the boreal forest," says Jeff Wells, one of the report's authors. Researchers explain that while tropical forests store most of their carbon in vegetation, boreal forests store vast amounts of the greenhouse gas deep in permafrost soil and peatlands in addition to its trees. Cold temperatures prevent the complete breakdown of dead biomass in the boreal, so that carbon is accumulated over time, sometimes even millennia. Scientists have found carbon that has been locked away for 8,000 years. ...

Wells says that these findings should not change scientists' or policymakers' view that tropical forests require immediate protection, but only that boreal forests must also be included in negotiations if the world is to successfully to mitigate climate change.

See the report here: http://www.borealbirds.org/carbonreport.shtml or download the full report.

Tagged: Arctic, News, Polar research: Reports and findings

(Alister Doyle/Reuters, 12 November 2009) -- Greenland's ice losses are accelerating and nudging up sea levels, according to a study showing that icebergs breaking away and meltwater runoff are equally to blame for the shrinking ice sheet. The report, using computer models to confirm satellite readings, indicated that ice losses quickened in 2006-08 to the equivalent of 0.75 mm (0.03 inch) of world sea level rise per year from an average 0.46 mm a year for 2000-08.

"Mass loss has accelerated," said Michiel van den Broeke, of Utrecht University in the Netherlands, who led the study, in Friday's edition of the journal Science. "The years 2006-08, with their warm summers, have seen a huge melting," he told Reuters of the study with colleagues in the United States, the Netherlands and Britain. "The underlying causes suggest this trend is likely to continue in the near future," Jonathan Bamber, a co-author at the University of Bristol, said in a statement. The computer models matched satellite data for ice losses—raising confidence in the findings—and showed that losses were due equally to meltwater, caused by rising temperatures, and icebergs breaking off from glaciers.

Tagged: Arctic, News, Polar research: Reports and findings