València (EFE).- Wetlands, formerly perceived as sources of diseases, dried up and, in general, little valued for their ecological contribution, could soon be used by companies to offset their carbon emissions, since these well-managed ecosystems are major CO2 sinks. Wetlands, in CO2 compensation, are no longer neglected; now they are allies.
This was stated to EFE by researchers from the University of Valencia involved in the European Life Wetlands4Climate project, which tests the different ways of managing Mediterranean wetlands to turn them into allies against climate change, instead of emitters of greenhouse gases that they represent when they are in poor condition.
The team led by Antonio Camacho, professor of the Department of Microbiology and Ecology of the University of Valencia (UV), collects samples from wetlands to analyze in the laboratory and check the evolution in the potential of emitting greenhouse gases in a specific wetland and thus evaluate the effectiveness of the actions.
“The witnesses make up the first centimeters of the sediment where the microorganisms stratified in different layers responsible for the emission of gases are,” explained the researcher Carlos Rochera from this team, while holding these samples -cylindrical elongated vessels- that also have a column of water and an air chamber.
Wetlands in CO2 compensation
“Depending on the incubation time in which we let the samples accumulate gases, they do so at a more or less stable rate, so knowing that time we can subsequently measure the accumulated gas concentration,” he stressed.
Part of the difficulty of this ambitious project lies in attributing the cause of the greater or lesser emission of gases in a wetland, since environmental and management factors intervene.
According to Rochera, the aim is to anticipate how a wetland will behave -for example, how much carbon it will be able to retain and how much methane it will be able to emit- in relation to the different ways of managing the ecosystem, under different conditions and future scenarios, such as those of higher temperature and variability of rainfall.
Nor should the actions be the same for all types of Mediterranean wetlands: in fact, something that the expert qualifies as “determinant” are “its salinity characteristics, its hydroperiod, which refers to the time of year in which the basin is flooded”.
Another key factor is the state of conservation, which, according to Rochera, the higher it is, the more potential the wetland will have to capture and retain carbon.
“We do not understand life without water”
“Living beings in their natural processes fix carbon and release carbon in the form of gases that cause the greenhouse effect, but they are also capable of capturing them from the atmosphere,” explained Antonio Camacho.
The reason why wetlands are carbon sinks -but also potential emitters- is water, he pointed out.
“We do not understand life without water,” he said, and “since biological activity is linked to water and wetlands are a type of ecosystem linked to water -either temporarily or permanently- they have such great potential, even larger than most other ecosystem types on Earth.”
Thus, this initiative co-financed by the European Union is acting experimentally on these Mediterranean wetlands applying “certain types of actions that will allow us in a few years for wetlands to be conserved or restored in climate mitigation projects, climate compensation”, has detailed Camacho.
“The fundamental thing is to drastically reduce emissions”, insisted the professor, because, according to the international scientific community, the world has to transition to a totally decarbonised economy and therefore it is necessary “that greenhouse gas emissions become zero as soon as possible, at least the balances”.
“This will help us recover. If not, we will not be able to do it, since the rate of increase in emissions and generation of warming is much greater, than what all the ecosystems of the Earth can do as a whole ”, she has warned.