The Weekly Anthropocene, April 5 2023
Rewilding to save the climate, an Inflation Reduction Act for Canada, a rooftop solar super-boom in China, cheetah cubs in India, and more!
Rewilding & Climate
A landmark new paper in Nature Climate Change (here’s a free access link, with map), “Trophic rewilding can expand natural climate solutions,” makes the case that restoring large wild animal populations would substantially help in the fight against climate change. Large animals tend to increase landscapes and seascapes’ carbon sequestration capacity in a multitude of ways: encouraging plant growth through mechanisms like seed dispersal, grazing animals preventing wildfires by maintaining a healthy plant density, and a multitude of species fertilizing the land or the sea with their feces to produce more plant life. (Whales and ocean-going fish in particular appear to be responsible for fertilizing vast amounts of carbon-sequestering phytoplankton).
The researchers calculated that if key major animal populations around the world were protected and revived, it would sequester 6.4 billion tons of CO2 per year-about a sixth of global energy …
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