This talk is co-hosted with the Yale Center for Natural Carbon Capture.
About the Seminar:
Forest management is a hot topic these days. In 2021 the IPCC announced that humans need to capture and store excess carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, alongside deep and immediate fossil fuel emission cuts. In response, governments and private corporations are eager to find immediate tools and technologies to meet the carbon dioxide removal challenge. Forests are an appealing solution. Globally forests absorb over 7 billion metric tonnes of carbon dioxide each year. Forests also provide valuable other services like providing habitat for biodiversity, fuel and fiber for humans, and cleaning our air and water. However, forests also emit carbon dioxide when they are disturbed by wildfires, pest and pathogen outbreaks, and storms, which are all predicted to increase with a changing climate. This is leading to concerns that forests may be an unreliable and transient form of carbon storage. There also may be important trade-offs between managing forests to maximize carbon storage carbon and the other services forests provide. A pressing question, therefore, is can we manage forests in a changing world to sustain the services forests provide today? This seminar will explore recent research coming out of the Yale Applied Science Synthesis Program that addresses this question.
About the Series:
Over the last twelve years, the Yale School of the Environment has held a weekly seminar series, called BIOMES, which has been the School’s flagship forum for bringing cutting-edge research and impactful work to the community. BIOMES stands for ‘Bridging Issues & Optimizing Methods in Environmental Studies”
The series is a community-sourced and student-led effort designed to bring different perspectives to YSE’s main stage.