Harper, A. B.; Powell, T.; Cox, P. M.; House, J.; Huntingford, C.; Lenton, T. M. et al. (2018): Land-use emissions play a critical role in land-based mitigation for Paris climate targets. In: Nat Comms 9 (1), S. 405. DOI: 10.1038/s41467-018-05340-z.

"Here we show that additional land-use change to meet a 1.5 °C climate change target could result in net losses of carbon from the land. The effectiveness of BECCS strongly depends on several assumptions related to the choice of biomass, the fate of initial above ground biomass, and the fossil-fuel emissions offset in the energy system. Depending on these factors, carbon removed from the atmosphere through BECCS could easily be offset by losses due to land-use change. If BECCS involves replacing high-carbon content ecosystems with crops, then forest-based mitigation could be more eficient for atmospheric CO2 removal than BECCS."

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Goldberg, David; Aston, Lara; Bonneville, Alain; Demirkanli, Inci; Evans, Curtis; Fisher, Andrew et al. (2018): Geological storage of CO 2 in sub-seafloor basalt. The CarbonSAFE pre-feasibility study offshore Washington State and British Columbia. In: Energy Procedia 146, S. 158–165. DOI: 10.1016/j.egypro.2018.07.020.

"Sub-seafloor basalts are very common on Earth and enable CO₂ mineralization as a long-term storage mechanism, permanently sequestering the carbon in solid rock form. Our project goals include the evaluation of this reservoir as an industrial-scale CO₂ storage complex, developing potential source/transport scenarios, conducting laboratory and modeling studies to determine the potential capacity of the reservoir, and completing an assessment of economic, regulatory and project management risks."

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"This is geoengineering, a range of complex and controversial techniques that are set to one day be used to tinker with global weather systems."

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Pawlok, D.; Houlton, B. Z.; Wang, Y.; Warlind, D. (2018): Grasslands may be more reliable carbon sinks than forests in California. In: Environ. Res. Lett. 13 (7), S. 74027. DOI: 10.1088/1748-9326/aacb39.

"Using a set of modeling experiments, we show that California grasslands are a more resilient C sink than forests in response to 21st century changes in climate, with implications for designing climate-smart Cap and Trade offset policies. The resilience of grasslands to rising temperatures, drought and fire, coupled with the preferential banking of C to belowground sinks, helps to preserve sequestered terrestrial C and prevent it from re-entering the atmosphere."

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