Restoring the Climate Through Capture and Storage of Soil Carbon
By: Savory Institute (2015)

Key Takeaways

  • In this 20-page whitepaper, the Savory Institute lays out the case for how and why the cycling of carbon into soils is critical to restoring our planetary ecosystem.
  • There are several erroneous assumptions in different mainstream disciplines—rooted in a mechanistic worldview—that are obstacles to re-establishing the evolutionary grassland-grazer relationship for long-term sequestration of carbon in soils, including that grazing animals chronically overgraze rangelands and thus require "resting" to be restored, climate action should focus solely on reduced emissions, soils are a limited carbon sink, etc.
  • In order to realize the potential hope that grasslands of the world provide for us, we must shift the mechanistic perspective to one that is holistic, acknowledging that nature functions in complex and interconnected wholes, ecosystem health is the norm and not the exception, healthy soils are complex collections of interdependent life forms, and effective ecosystem restoration—of which Holistic Planned Grazing is an essential component—can restore grasslands and stabilize carbon in the atmosphere to mitigate the adverse effects of global warming.

Summary

The quantity of carbon contained in soils is directly related to the diversity and health of soil life. All organic carbon sequestered in soils is extracted from the atmosphere by photosynthesis and converted to complex molecules by bacteria and fungi in synergy with insects and animals. An effective, profitable, and culturally relevant method for increasing soil organic carbon is by restoring grasslands worldwide to their optimal health. To accomplish this at the scale and pace that we need, Holistic Management and one of its associated processes, Holistic Planned Grazing offers us a tangible way to restore our climate by properly managing livestock to build soil life. Since the 1970s Holistic Management’s effectiveness has been well documented on millions of hectares on four continents. By restoring grasslands through Holistic Planned Grazing we have the potential to remove excess atmospheric carbon resulting from both anthropogenic soil loss over the past 10,000 years and industrial-era greenhouse gas emissions. This sequestration potential, when applied to up to 5 billion hectares of degraded grassland soils, could return 10 or more gigatons of excess atmospheric carbon to the terrestrial sink annually thereby lowering greenhouse gas concentrations to pre-industrial levels in a matter of decades. This while restoring agriculture productivity, providing jobs for thousands of people in rural communities, supplying high quality protein for millions, and enhancing wildlife habitat and water resources.

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