Environment: Content from Across the ABC


Date/Time 29 Dec 2014 6:30:30am
Wood doesn't store carbon or very long. A tree might live for a few decades of maybe 100 years if you're lucky. if you use the wood to make something, it might last a couple more decades or 100 years if you're lucky. But eventually the wood will rot and release methane, which is much worse than CO2 as a greenhouse gas.

We need to lock carbon away for thousands of years. A low cost, low tech way of doing this is to grow trees or other fast-growing plants and convert them to low temperature charcoal. This is called biochar. As well as being a stable form of carbon, when ploughed into the soil it improves soil fertility.