Forests and soil: the perfect duo to stop global warming

Hey, people! Today we are going to talk about a super innovative experiment that was carried out for a decade in the mountains of Sierra Nevada, California, they discovered something very interesting: climate change is affecting carbon stores that are buried deep in the ground and that’s not good for combating global warming, do you know why? A group of scientists from the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and the University of Zurich conducted a mind-blowing study and found that organic compounds that could help sequester carbon in deep soils are breaking down due to global warming. What a problem!

And this has serious implications for our fight against global warming, because it turns out that forests and soil act like real heroes, absorbing around 25% of all carbon emissions. Plants, during photosynthesis, store carbon in their structure and in the soil, but with population growth and our need for more land for crops and wood, we are in trouble. Deforestation and agriculture are responsible for a good part of greenhouse gases, crazy!

The study showed that climate change will affect all aspects of soil carbon and nutrient cycling. There is no magic solution to sequestering carbon in a warming world, but we need to improve our soil management practices, especially in agriculture and forestry, to do what we can to less disturb the soil and keep it healthy. In 2021, these same scientists showed that warmer temperatures caused a 33% loss in forest soil carbon stocks in just five years. That’s a lot! In the new study, they found that warmer temperatures are also affecting the organic compounds in the soil that plants produce during photosynthesis. A real madness!

Scientists conducted a mind-blowing experiment in the Sierra Nevada mountains, where they heated the ground 4 degrees Celsius (7 degrees Fahrenheit) hotter than normal. And you know what they found? Warming for only 4.5 years caused huge changes in carbon stocks deeper than 30 centimeters! That’s pretty profound, don’t you think? They found that there was a 17% loss in lignin, the compound that gives plants rigidity, and almost a 30% loss in cutin and suberin, the waxy compounds that protect plants from pathogens. The ground is suffering!

In addition, they found a significant difference in the amount of “pyrogenic carbon” in soil that was heated compared to unheated soil. Pyrogenic carbon is a type of organic carbon that forms after a forest fire and was thought to be stable. But it’s not as stable as we thought! It decomposed as fast as any other material when the soil warmed up. What a surprise! So boys and girls, taking care of our forests and soils is more important than ever. Remember, Mother Nature is speaking to us and we must listen to her!