CLM20-2 full issue-1 - Flipbook - Page 20
A guide to
conservation land
management and
greenhouse gas
emissions
Malcolm Ausden and Rob Field
C
onservation practitioners are charged not
only with conserving wildlife, but often
nowadays also with doing so in ways that
address the climate crisis at the same time. While
many semi-natural habitats can help cool the
climate by capturing and storing carbon, this is
not always the case, and there can be trade-offs
between maximising conservation benefits and
maximising climate benefits. In this article, we
describe the impact on the climate of different
habitats and their management and the conflicts
that exist when focusing on wildlife and the
climate, and highlight types of conservation land
management that provide the greatest climate
benefits. A more detailed summary of the effects
on carbon storage and sequestration of different
habitats and their management is provided by
Gregg et al. (2021).
How do we measure the impacts of land
management on the climate?
When attempting to quantify the effects of
different habitats on the climate, people often
refer to the quantity of carbon stored in
them. While this provides a useful measure
of the value of different habitats in terms of
having removed carbon from the atmosphere
in the past, the best way to ascertain the
ongoing impact of various habitats and their
management is to estimate the net flux of the
most important greenhouse gases (GHGs), and
to express this in terms of the overall level of
warming or cooling of the climate produced
by it.
The most important GHGs with respect to
land management are carbon dioxide (CO2),
methane (CH4) and nitrous oxide (N2O). The
flux of the last two gases is expressed in terms
of the quantity of CO2 needed to produce the
same level of warming. This is known as global
warming potential (GWP) and its units are
‘tonnes of CO2 equivalent’, which is usually
shown as t CO2e. The GWP can be positive,
meaning that it produces a warming effect on
the climate, or it can be negative, if it produces
a cooling effect. Most commonly, GWP values
18 Conservation Land Management Summer 2022 | Vol. 20 No. 2
