Carbon Sequestration: a Potential Source of Income for Farmers

Concerns regarding climate changes due to human activities have largely increased in the past few years. Many scientists believe that atmospheric build-up of greenhouse gas1 (GHG) concentrations is causing the climate to change (IPCC, 2007a,b). Furthermore, a large number of scientists assert that continuing levels of GHG emissions will lead to substantial future climate change. Carbon dioxide is the largest of the GHGs in both emissions and concentration (Butt and McCarl, 2005, IPCC, 2007c). Reducing net carbon dioxide emissions to the atmosphere is increasingly being considered as a way of addressing the climate change problem. International efforts to stabilize the atmospheric concentration of GHGs resulted in a 1997 treaty, the Kyoto Protocol, which was developed with the involvement of over 160 countries, including the U.S. (Butt and McCarl, 2005). In the Kyoto Protocol, the developed countries (like the U.S., U.K. and Canada) agreed to limit their GHG emissions, rolling back to below the levels emitted in 1990. U.S. emissions are about six billion metric tons (tonnes) of carbon dioxide plus about 1 million more carbon dioxide-equivalent (CO2e) in other gasses. Within the Kyoto Protocol, the U.S. emissions were to be reduced to seven percent below 1990 levels by 2008-2012, which given projected emissions growth would have required scaling back emissions by 30 to 40 percent of what would have occurred in the 2008-2012 time period or 2.1 to 2.8 billion tonnes of CO2e