Woodwell Climate Research Center

This was a great conversation.

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Some even argue that if you restore enough soil by properly managing rangelands where cattle graze, you could offset some of the warming caused by methane emissions from cattle.

Over half of rangelands in the U.S. are degraded, which results in the loss of 50 billion tons of carbon that could be stored in those soils, according to calculations by Jonathan Sanderman, a senior scientist at the Woodwell Climate Research Center, who studies the role soils can play in climate mitigation.

Restoring those soils could potentially remove from tens to thousands of millions of tons of atmospheric CO2 a year, according to some estimates.

But we have to be cautious about those projections, says Lehner of Earthjustice.

Early suppression brings costs and trade-offs.

A 2022 peer-reviewed study in Science Advances, led by Carly Phillips of the Union of Concerned Scientists and Woodwell Climate Research Center, projected that boreal burned area could increase by 24 cent 169% in Alaska and 36 to 150% in Canada between 2020 and 2050.

If existing fire suppression levels continued, cumulative net emissions could reach 1.33 to 11.93 gigatons of carbon dioxide over that period.

The authors estimated that expanded fire management in Alaska could avoid CO2 emissions at an average cost of approximately US$1.63 per metric ton, comparable to or below several other mitigation approaches evaluated in the study.

I'd be happy to come back anytime.

Not a Climate Scientist is a podcast from Woodwell Climate Research Center.

Like and follow us wherever you're getting this podcast, then head over to our website to sign up for emails so you never miss an episode.

And thanks for being part of the Not a Climate Scientist community.

WBUR's Barbara Moran.

Her story was produced with support from the Woodwell Climate Research Center.

You can find all of our reverse course climate stories from Alaska at hyperfollow.com slash here and now Alaska.

And in that special episode of this podcast from last Friday, September 25th, a little something for you to listen to over the weekend if you missed it.