Prepared for Agriculture’s Role in Mitigating Climate Change Workshop

This paper draws heavily, including excerpted passages, from one of the author’s published papers on permanence issues (Murray et al, 2007) 2 Storage of CO2 in biological terrestrial carbon stocks is subject to re-emission into the atmosphere. In the case of carbon sequestration projects in agriculture, land use change and forestry (AgLUCF), the potential for re-emission stems from natural risks such as fires and floods as well, anthropogenic risks stemming from the ease with which a farmer can simply switch back to conventional emitting practices, and contractual risk from the fact that projects will generally have a finite life and compensation terms. This aspect of biological carbon sequestration (or “sinks”) is referred to as the potential reversal or impermanence of greenhouse gas (GHG) mitigation benefits. If the sequestered carbon is returned to the atmosphere as CO2, the original benefits of the project have been reversed. Clearly, such a project does not have the same climate protection benefits as another AgLUCF project that keeps the carbon permanently sequestered in biomass or the soil layer, or a project in another sector that permanently reduces GHG emission