Lefebvre, David; Williams, Adrian; Meersmans, Jeroen; Kirk, Guy J. D.; Sohi, Saran; Goglio, Pietro; Smith, Pete (2020): Modelling the potential for soil carbon sequestration using biochar from sugarcane residues in Brazil. In Sci Rep 10 (1), p. 19479. DOI: 10.1038/s41598-020-76470-y.

"Sugarcane (Saccharum officinarum L.) cultivation leaves behind around 20 t ha⁻¹ of biomass residue after harvest and processing. We investigated the potential for sequestering carbon (C) in soil with these residues by partially converting them into biochar (recalcitrant carbon-rich material)."

LINK

Varney, Rebecca M.; Chadburn, Sarah E.; Friedlingstein, Pierre; Burke, Eleanor J.; Koven, Charles D.; Hugelius, Gustaf; Cox, Peter M. (2020): A spatial emergent constraint on the sensitivity of soil carbon turnover to global warming. In Nat Comms 11 (1), p. 5544. DOI: 10.1038/s41467-020-19208-8.

"Here, we present a constraint on ΔC_s,τ, which makes use of current heterotrophic respiration and the spatial variability of τ_s inferred from observations. This spatial emergent constraint allows us to halve the uncertainty in ΔC_s,τ at 2 °C to −232 ± 52 PgC."

LINK

Wang, Jing; Feng, Liang; Palmer, Paul I.; Liu, Yi; Fang, Shuangxi; Bösch, Hartmut et al. (2020): Large Chinese land carbon sink estimated from atmospheric carbon dioxide data. In Nature 586 (7831), pp. 720–723. DOI: 10.1038/s41586-020-2849-9.

"Here we present recently available data on the atmospheric mole fraction of CO₂, measured from six sites across China during 2009 to 2016. Using these data, we estimate a mean Chinese land biosphere sink of −1.11 ± 0.38 petagrams of carbon per year during 2010 to 2016, equivalent to about 45 per cent of our estimate of annual Chinese anthropogenic emissions over that period."

LINK

"For a long time, farmers have realized that soil organic matter improves the quality of soils, by improving water-hold capacity, friability, and nutrient content. But, however we do it—fertilization, irrigation, manuring, reduced tillage, and planting cover crops—increasing soil organic matter doesn’t look like such a good idea to mitigate climate change. The chemistry of humus substances includes a substantial amount of nitrogen and phosphorus that will limit our efforts."

LINK