FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: September 1, 2009
CONTACT: Liz Brooking, Stroud Water Research Center
610-268-2153 x 274 or lbrooking@stroudcenter.org
NEWS RELEASE
Scientists Argue that Climate Change Mitigation Strategies Fall Short, Ignoring
Significant Carbon Cycling Processes of Inland Waters
AVONDALE, PA – In the paper, The Boundless Carbon Cycle, published in the
September issue of Nature Geoscience, scientists from the University of Vienna, Uppsala
University in Sweden, University of Antwerp, and the U.S. based Stroud™ Water
Research Center argue that current international strategies to mitigate manmade carbon
emissions and address climate change have overlooked a critical player - inland waters.
Streams, rivers, lakes, reservoirs, and wetlands play an important role in the carbon cycle
that is unaccounted for in conventional carbon cycling models. The commentary comes
just months before COP15, the December 2009 UN Climate Change Conference in
Copenhagen where representatives from 192 countries will gather to decide upon a 2012
climate agreement that will succeed the “Kyoto protocol.”
Dr. Tom J. Battin of the department of Freshwater Ecology at the University of Vienna
and lead author of the paper states that “While inland waters represent only 1% of the
Earth’s surface, their contribution to the carbon cycle is disproportionately large,
underestimated, and not recognized within the models on which the Kyoto protocol was
based.”
The team of scientists points out that all current global carbon models consider inland
waters static conduits that transfer carbon from the continents to the oceans. In reality,
inland waters are dynamic ecosystems with the potential to alter the fates of terrestrial
carbon delivered to them including: burial in sediments leading to long-term storage or
sequestration; and metabolism in rivers and subsequent outgassing of respired carbon
dioxide to the atmosphere.
"Twenty percent of the continental carbon sequestration actually occurs as burial in
inland water se