CARBON SERIES - INTRODUCTION
The goal of our CARBON SERIES is to help designers and landowners understand the implications of carbon as it relates to issues of climate, biodiversity, and productive landscapes. In our introduction we provide a primer to CARBON and how RFC plans to explore the topic moving forward.
This is a LIVING DOCUMENT that we will continue to update with introductory material on carbon. Please continue to drop in and follow along.
Introduction
As designers, we are not climate scientists, we are not ecologists, and we are not farmers. We are systems thinkers, who gather diverse voices, analyze spatial conditions, and scrutinize information to make sense of abstract and complex ideas. Broadly, our work is about communication and understanding how to draw connections between ideas and make them visually understandable to clients, consultants, and the broader community. It is a unique skill that serves us well outside of being the builders of buildings or the designers of landscapes and cities.
Issues around ‘climate change,’ ‘extreme weather events,’ or however one chooses to politicize or de-politicize our current climate reality, ask designers to use their unique toolkit to aid communities and landowners in making sense of how to create a more resilient future for themselves and their families. Climate adaptation doesn’t need to be a political talking point. It does, however, need to be a discussion about how to manage our land and resources differently to overcome recurring economic and ecological challenges.
Our CARBON SERIES will explain why carbon is a valuable metric for measuring ecological health while providing economic incentives to landowners through natural capital markets. But more importantly, we’ll highlight methods for landowners to create more ecologically resilient farms and forests through the design of diversified land management techniques.
Follow along as we continue to gather expertise and resources around carbon farming and show how design and design thinking lends itself to the development of carbon plans and methods.
WHY CARBON?
Carbon dioxide (CO2) is one of the earth's primary atmospheric gasses, alongside methane and nitrous oxide, and the primary focus of discussions around climate change. Common terms like 'carbon emissions,' 'carbon sequestration,' 'carbon offsets,' and 'carbon credits' lead one to believe that carbon is inherently flawed, which couldn't be further from the truth. Carbon is the second most abundant element in the human body, the fifteenth most abundant element on earth, and the fourth most abundant element in the universe. For our discussion, carbon is a tool for increasing biodiversity, feeding the world, and enhancing the overall quality of life on earth.
There are four primary carbon 'sinks ': the atmosphere, oceans, forests, and soils. Since life began on earth, carbon has balanced itself between these sinks, creating various climate scenarios and allowing different forms of flora and fauna to emerge, adapt, or die out in each scenario. Human life has flourished in a carbon scenario much like the one we have today. The right balance of atmospheric carbon levels created consistently mild temperatures that allowed humans to exert labor energy throughout the day. During that same time, soils rich with carbon were ideal for producing agricultural yields that fed and expanded civilizations.
It has taken over three hundred years since the beginning of the agricultural revolution to see those conditions start to change. The degradation of soils due to tilling and monoculture farming practices has released soil carbon into the sky in the form of carbon dioxide. As nations have industrialized, this process has taken place at unprecedented levels, overburdening our atmospheric carbon sink in the process. Consequently, when our atmospheric sink rises, so does our oceans. Oceans absorb atmospheric carbon, increasing their acidity in the process.
Adding fuel to the fire, the earth's most crucial carbon sponge, our forests, has been compromised during this time. Urbanization and industrial agriculture have demanded much of our forested lands. Once covering 57% of the earth's habitable land, our global forests have been reduced to two-thirds of their original territory, slowing the regeneration of carbon-rich soils in the process.
In our CLIMATE SERIES, we will first focus on our soil carbon and forest carbon sinks by discussing the work in carbon farming, techniques, design decisions, and farm plans that allow farmers to grow healthy crops while replenishing carbon into our soils. And secondly, we'll discuss all things forestry as we dive into afforestation, ecological restoration, and natural capital markets, all through a design lens.
