Conservation and climate change

Excerpt

Climate drives conservation outcomes. That's obvious. Climate is one of the primary factors in soil formation. Rainfall, temperature, growing season, and a host of other climatic factors determine, in large part, what conservation should or could achieve in a given location.

Climate change, then, is a topic the Soil and Water Conservation Society should and has been engaged in. My first encounter with the Soil and Water Conservation Society and climate change came early in 1998—just before I came on board as executive director. I was invited to speak at a workshop on carbon sequestration in soil that the Society was hosting in Calgary, Alberta, Canada. That workshop was one of the first attempts to consolidate estimates of the contribution soil conservation could make to reducing concentrations of greenhouse gases by storing carbon in the soil. Participants concluded that soil conservation could store enough carbon to meet as much as 15 percent of the mitigation targets that the United States and Canada were expected, at that time, to achieve.

That Soil and Water Conservation Society report was timely, to the point, and its message was heard within policy and scientific circles. It helped spark a great ...