# Carboreal Stage 2026, Dallas, Dr. Curtis J. Richardson

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SS9KjslTAi4

[00:03] You know, geoengineering can be dangerous, can do some good things.
[00:08] For example, I'm not about I'm definitely not for adding tons of iron to the ocean to I don't think that's going to work.
[00:14] Turned out to be not very good idea, but I'm always looking forward to people can try new solutions.
[00:19] So, we've been hearing about different scales and different opportunities and the political interactions and so forth and financial.
[00:26] So today I'm going to talk about Petland's climate change and an inverted carbon market.
[00:31] So I'll get a little bit into the finances.
[00:33] This project is a Duke University project.
[00:35] Uh I have a whole staff working on this.
[00:38] It' be a long list of people that put on there.
[00:41] This actually is the project site I took from uh one of my uh No, I wasn't in a spaceship.
[00:47] That's actually one of our uh series of drones that we use.
[00:48] Uh I wasn't up there.
[00:52] But this project uh has a number of aspects.
[00:56] I've been working on this for over 25 years and one day it sort of occurred to me, wait a minute, these are amazing carbon.
[01:05] Sinks.
[01:05] There must be some way we can monetize this so that we can actually restore some of these so they won't do the damage that's taking place with a lot of peatlands.
[01:18] So for some of those who don't work in peatlands, um I just take a second.
[01:21] What is peatland?
[01:25] Uh peatland is an accumulation of partially decomposed vegetation formed in wetland conditions, accumulates for thousands of years.
[01:32] And of course here's some pictures that go all the way we've been doing studies all the way from northern Sweden all the way down in Peru.
[01:38] You got tropical peatlands.
[01:39] You've got cold climate peatlands.
[01:40] You've got places like the Everglades.
[01:42] You have and uh so they really cover pretty much every continent.
[01:47] And what's why they're important is that peatlands or organic soils are plant-based material and they're roughly a good rule of thumb is they're 50% carbon.
[01:58] Most forests are about 1 to 3%.
[02:00] These are 50%.
[02:04] If you have uh forest growing on mineral.
[02:07] Soils.
[02:09] Well, peatland degradation is a big problem.
[02:12] We have here 3 to 4% of the anthropogenic emissions, about 1, uh, two gigatons per year, coming from places like Indonesia, Malaysia, and other other places.
[02:24] Especially here, you see an example of fires that are being burned off for changing peatlands into palm oil plantations.
[02:31] And these carbon losses that go up in fire are very recoverable in our time period.
[02:37] These are thousands of years of carbon.
[02:38] And of course, we're starting to see that we're seeing the urgent need for peatland conservation, more in Europe and other places than in the US.
[02:46] But there is a number of papers, even in the this one here, the the Washington Post was talking about useless swamps may help save the world.
[02:56] You got another one here, 17% of the peatland's vital to curbing climate change.
[03:00] Mismatch between global importance of peatland.
[03:03] So the press is starting to, uh, understand this and it's.
[03:07] Been critical.
[03:09] I've gone to wetland meetings for 40 plus years and very seldom do we have any press whatsoever listening to this.
[03:15] They don't come to these meetings.
[03:16] Occasionally triple but not a lot of these meetings.
[03:19] Now some of the people are starting to say we want to bring the press in because we need to get this information out to people who actually would pay for this and actually benefit from it.
[03:28] So petland restoration.
[03:30] So if you look at petlands about uh they cover 400 to 500 million hectares worldwide 3 to 4% of the earth's surface about 50 to 60 million hectares of this is drained uh which again contributing about this 3 to 5% of the global emissions but if you start looking at this and I'll start on a larger scale and get down here you can see the restoration opportunity in North America is about 4 million hectares this is a drain petlands.
[04:00] If you look at the global degragation, it's about 50 to 60 million hectares.
[04:05] Canada has about 2.2 million and the United States has about 1.8 billion.
[04:10] Hectares that could be restored from this drainage.
[04:14] So what's the petland problem?
[04:14] So I'm going to describe it in my sense from my background.
[04:19] The petland problem is low value given to petlands and naturebased solutions.
[04:25] Why?
[04:25] We'll talk about that in a minute.
[04:28] The scale of ARR forestry credits that are given versus petland greenhouse gas losses I'm going to show you is massive.
[04:37] Reforestation carbon credits are of course correctly put in protocols as removals but versus emission reductions for peelings you're going to see that most of the carbon story the carbon cycle for peelings is not uh essential removals or forestation it's reductions emission reductions and there's no climate market recognition for what I call ecological equivalence.
[05:04] That's my main message today.
[05:04] Currently, lower values for carbon credits are given for emission reductions of CO2.
[05:10] Released to the atmosphere versus removal.
[05:13] I'll show you what that means ecologically.
[05:17] The carbon cycle and drain versus rewet petlands and their key role in climate change.
[05:21] I'm going to give you the picosan example.
[05:22] I'll tell you right away is a strange word.
[05:24] It's an American Indian word.
[05:27] Algon Indian meaning swamp on a hill.
[05:32] So where did the problem come from?
[05:34] This is a very famous paper.
[05:36] This is probably one of the most cited papers in the the climate business and especially relates to naturebased solutions.
[05:40] It came out of um Arjon basically in science advances in 2018.
[05:46] It shows the climate mitigation potential uh in 2025 and teroggrams of CO2.
[05:52] It gives you over here it gives you the values and dollars and you can see right at the top is forest re uh restoration.
[06:00] You got then you got for natural forest management and avoided conversion so forth.
[06:06] Then you got grasslands with the same thing crop cover biochar so forth.
[06:10] And then you get way down here at the bottom and you see.
[06:11] Wetlands, and it looks like I've been asked at many meetings.
[06:16] They say, "Well, I've seen this paper."
[06:17] Wetlands don't really have anything to do with this.
[06:19] And you will notice that wetlands are down here and peatlands are even lower.
[06:23] Now, they do have, obviously, they show other benefits, biodiversity and other benefits and soil and water, but in terms of this little green boxes, they don't seem to have much value.
[06:33] And there's a reason for that.
[06:35] This is all based on basically productivity, net ecosystems, growth, and that means removal from the atmosphere by the plants.
[06:45] Bogs don't grow very fast.
[06:47] Therefore, they don't get any credit, but they have one-third of the world's soil carbon.
[06:56] So, let's do the comparison of numbers.
[06:58] I said, I'm going to do some comparisons.
[06:59] So if you take a look at the ARR carbon credits cumulative to date that have been sold, this is out of the opus market data 2021-2024, 60 to 100 million metric tons of CO2 from Vera ACR.
[07:15] Registry and some other ones.
[07:18] The pete petland degradation annual emissions is 1.5 to 2.5 billion.
[07:26] I'm not saying this is not important to do, but look at the other side of the equation.
[07:29] How much is going up and we're not basically going to value that?
[07:34] That's a question.
[07:38] And if you look, that means for every ton of carbon sequestered through ARR projects to date, pet degradation releases 28 to 40 tons annually to the atmosphere.
[07:49] They're just completely offscale comparisons.
[07:53] That is not to say AI is not important, but that's where a lot of the money and a lot of the effort has been going and that's why we've got to recently look over at Petlands as another part of this solution.
[08:03] Not not saying we shouldn't have ARR.
[08:06] We definitely need it, but we need to basically when you look at it, there's more carbon in the petlands than there are all the forests in the world.
[08:17] Ecological climates equivalencies.
[08:19] Now, this is the basis of the rest of my talk.
[08:20] Climate goal.
[08:22] What's the goal?
[08:24] The goal for everyone is to reduce the volume of CO2 and greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.
[08:29] That's the goal.
[08:31] Everyone agrees that's our goal to do that if we're in the climate business and agree on this problem.
[08:37] What is ecological equivalency?
[08:38] It means the prevention of one ton of CO2 from entering the atmosphere, which is reduced ecosystem emissions, has the same effect on global warming as the removal of one ton from the atmosphere.
[08:50] Because you have a ton in the atmosphere.
[08:53] If you add it or take it away, that's a ton.
[08:57] It has the same long-term climate equivalency.
[08:59] But the carbon markets need to recognize this equivalency and give equal value and credit for both.
[09:06] It's going to be important as you're going to see because when we have these credits for sale on the carbon market, and I'll get to the end of this where the economics comes in, we're going to be confronted with this directly.
[09:15] I'll show.
[09:17] You the results.
[09:20] Now, some of you may or may not have seen this paper by Brander at all.
[09:23] This came out a couple of months ago.
[09:25] This paper tries to classify the activities in relationship to removals and climate effects.
[09:30] Basically pointing out that the actual nomenclature is one of the things that's holding up the carbon market globally.
[09:38] And it puts it into four boxes relative to the baseline.
[09:42] Increased removals or preventions down here of remissions.
[09:46] The system either has net removals or the system has net emissions.
[09:51] And if you look, there's type A, type B, type C, and type D.
[09:57] I won't talk about type B and type D.
[09:59] Things like corn, ethanol, which are considered, if you do the actual carbon balance, they're worthless in terms of actually preventing climate problems.
[10:07] So, they clearly state that on the right hand side, you don't really want to be focusing on some of these.
[10:11] You want to look at a type which is direct carbon capture which we believe and we've talked about today as a way plant.
[10:19] Sequestration increased amount of carbon in the soil, but type C is what I'm going to point to: storing biogenic waste.
[10:28] And then I added rewetted peatlands; that was not in the original brand argument and classification.
[10:39] So let's look now, let's look at the peatland examples in the United States.
[10:43] We have about 16 million hectares of peatlands, and you can see where they're located, mostly in the northeast, uh, and Maine and places in upstate New York, and but mostly are in Minnesota and Wisconsin and Michigan, and then of course some in Alaska.
[10:58] But in the southeast, I'm going to be talking about the two and a half million hectares along the southeast coast.
[11:03] This is where they have a lot of peatlands.
[11:08] Of course, we have Florida Everglades and so on.
[11:09] So, let's talk about these pocosins.
[11:11] These Indian-defined evergreen shrub bogs restricted to the southeastern coastal plain.
[11:16] They're on broad shallow basins.
[11:18] They have drainage.
[11:20] Basin heads on broad flat uplands.
[11:22] They don't have any rivers through them.
[11:24] These are actually dome on a hill.
[11:26] They're actually petlands on a hill.
[11:28] They're rainfall fed and the water races off to the shore to the estuaries.
[11:33] They're right on the edge of the estuaries.
[11:34] They have a long hydro period and they're period they have periodic burning.
[11:38] They have both sand and but a lot of muck and pete and their dominant vegetation is pine and red bay and a number of species that actually produce this pete.
[11:51] Come on out.
[11:51] Uh I mapped these in 1981 when a couple of my students burned those students out.
[11:57] Um mapping all of these petlands in the state about a million hectares of Picosans uh originally twothirds of which are now developed.
[12:06] They're developed for forestry agriculture.
[12:08] And you can see a little bit it's hard to make it out but there are a little bit of these dotted areas that scattered throughout that make up one-third of the natural that's left.
[12:17] So twothirds have been drained.
[12:20] I'll show you some pictures.
[12:23] But we also measured, uh, in the 80s the amount of carbon in these systems.
[12:30] We estimated about 1.2 billion tons of CO2 stored in these petlands.
[12:33] That's a lot of peak.
[12:36] Here's an example.
[12:39] These colors show down here as much as 14 to 3-4 meters of peak on the coast of North Carolina.
[12:47] This is what they look like.
[12:50] There's the tall picosen which has about a meter of pete underneath.
[12:53] You can see these are controlled by ponpine and a number of other species.
[12:56] Short picosen in the upper right.
[12:59] That's the same, many of the same species, but it's on three more or four more meters of peak.
[13:05] And then of course what they look like when they're put into farmland, drain, and the peak oxidizing away.
[13:17] This is what they look like up close.
[13:18] You can see a drain system here now coming back with some pine.
[13:20] You can see.
[13:23] The size of that cypress stump that was there from about 1900.
[13:27] Natural picos in this left and on the right hand side you see the actual pete profile.
[13:34] And that's what the pete looks like.
[13:35] You notice the wood.
[13:36] It's all woody pete.
[13:38] We don't have spagnum.
[13:39] It's all very dense woody pete.
[13:40] And people were looking at using this one time for burning for fuel.
[13:46] It has very high BTU value.
[13:51] I think I can skip that.
[13:52] This is a pretty good group.
[13:53] But basically, I'm going to be talking about carbon equivalents.
[13:55] As you know, one ton of carbon equals 3.67 tons of CO2.
[13:57] And I'm going to convert everything to CO2 equivalents.
[14:03] So, I'm not going to talk about methane and N2O in my systems for very good reasons.
[14:09] You'll find out with well-known relationships pretty much worldwide.
[14:13] This is from my systems.
[14:16] Soil temperature increases, you get soil increased soil respiration.
[14:18] If the water table decreases or if it's a higher a
[14:24] Deeper water table, you get more CO2.
[14:27] If it gets near the surface, you have less.
[14:30] So essentially, you could look at any petlands worldwide and you can see as the water table gets near the surface, CO2 goes down.
[14:36] It's about 20 cm on average you get the most N2O if you have some.
[14:41] Methane only occurs when you get the water table under the surface.
[14:45] You can convert all that to CO2 equivalents.
[14:51] I'm not going to have any CO2, uh I mean any N2O or methane stories today because after 10 years of research this shows you one of our papers the amount of relative, uh, contribution to CO2 equivalents of both methane and N2O to picosen systems.
[15:08] The upper bar show you water tables at 90, 60, and roughly 30.
[15:15] But all what you really need to look at is basically the N2O, which is in this blue, purple, and the green.
[15:22] All of these are below 1%.
[15:25] So basically for all the protocols written for this type of petland, there's basically no N2O and no basically methane if the water tables are done properly.
[15:37] All right, let's get into I'm a scientist.
[15:39] I'm I basically do a lot of the science work on these aspects.
[15:43] So bear with me.
[15:44] I want to give you a little bit of background before I actually come to the conclusions of this.
[15:48] So look at drainage in eastern North Carolina.
[15:50] We've been draining North Carolina since the time of George Washington.
[15:54] Fact in my classes I used to say, "Who is this man?"
[15:56] And they'd say, "Oh, that the first president of the US."
[16:00] No, that was the first man who actually drained payments in the United States was George Washington.
[16:05] He and Thomas Jefferson.
[16:08] And they lost a lot of money.
[16:11] So, here you can see over 11,000 mi of drainage ditches in eastern North Carolina.
[16:19] And I'm going to focus on this 4,000 hectare farm which we just bought company called Pantheon Regeneration who
[16:25] I'm now working with as a science officer.
[16:27] That property was brought.
[16:31] Why did we get into this?
[16:33] How did this, how do I get even to do the work?
[16:35] I worked for 20 years to try to get funding on carbon and carbon cycling.
[16:39] Not much interest.
[16:40] They did say, well, they don't have much to do with the carbon cycle.
[16:43] Heatlands are not that important.
[16:46] So, here is the fire in 2008 because of all the drainage.
[16:49] And it burned, you can see here with these trees.
[16:52] This is an old cypress stump.
[16:54] This is a uh basically pines.
[16:57] It burned 3 meters of Pete.
[17:00] It burned so much Pete.
[17:03] It'd burn 40 well 16,000 hectares of Pete right down to the water shore.
[17:09] And I published some work on this.
[17:13] Some other people looked at it and they said, "Well, we've lost 9.9 terrams of carbon."
[17:17] Nobody, not even the local press said, "We don't know what that means."
[17:23] Well, that's no, that's 9.9 million.
[17:26] Metric tons.
[17:26] Nobody said anything.
[17:29] Then we did a small press release and we did this.
[17:32] We basically pointed out this was equivalent to carbon emissions to the atmosphere from 2,475,000 cars driving 12,000 miles in a year.
[17:45] Department of Energy and DO and Fish and Wildlife gave us a million-doll grant to basically see if rewetting would actually stop this release to the atmosphere.
[17:59] So that's back to my point of getting the press and the people involved so they know put it in terms they can understand because we when we start talking gigatons and teroggrams and all this you talk to talk to a press person and they have no clue what that means.
[18:13] So now we go back to the carbon farm and give you specifics.
[18:15] So here we are uh you can see where it's located in North Carolina the United States and this this particular area this pink area is actually owned by the Fish and Wildlife Service.
[18:25] It was a.
[18:26] Private farm.
[18:27] The government bought it.
[18:29] First from Nature Conservancy bought it, then he gave it to the government.
[18:33] So our private farm was the only in the holding within this federal land that 4,000 hectare piece.
[18:40] And we did a series of studies on all these blocks.
[18:43] You can see these blocks.
[18:44] Some of these blocks were refflooded and rewetted.
[18:47] And we've done research with Eddiflux towers and chambers for 15 years to look at the effects of water management on this carbon dioxide.
[18:55] The right hand corner you can see an Eddiflux tower.
[18:57] So our long-term objectives were to predict the carbon storage and losses, develop a proxy model which was really critical to the carbon market here and to assess the carbon stock uh risk uh due to Pete oxidation or firing.
[19:12] When I in these meetings with all the financial people on our project, people who come from us from like Axia and Microsoft, they're mostly business people.
[19:22] They have MBAs and all this, they're engineers and they keep asking me one word, what's the
[19:27] Risk?
[19:27] What will happen?
[19:27] Will it burn?
[19:29] Will we, you know, it's risk, risk, risk, risk, risk, which is for me a new term that I have to be have to deal with.
[19:35] So here we take a look with we're going to take a look at a little bit of data and then we're going to bring it into context of what this does for both the Southeast and the US.
[19:41] So here we see Eddie covariance measurements of net ecosystem exchange.
[19:45] We do this again is one of our drone pictures.
[19:48] There's our we have several of these.
[19:50] This is our bear enclosed Eddie flux tower.
[19:52] We have the largest black bear population on the east coast.
[19:57] And if you don't put that fence in electric wire around it, they tear $50,000 towers to shreds.
[20:01] They just they're just curious.
[20:06] They bite everything.
[20:09] And we use smart chambers which are an amazing of new piece of equipment that allows you to get soil respiration measurements instantaneously for methane CO2 and N2O.
[20:24] All right, let's look a little bit of data and then we'll get to the results.
[20:27] So if you're looking at water table
[20:29] depth and rewetting our question was how
[20:31] what depth do you put it at to actually
[20:33] get some in decrease in this gas loss of
[20:36] the atmosphere. So we have structures
[20:38] I'll show you these are water control
[20:40] structures called flashboard risers.
[20:42] I'll show you a picture of one. So if we
[20:44] want to look at the uh sites
[20:48] here we can see in the pink these two
[20:50] sites are drain sites. Not really
[20:53] important what the numbers are, but
[20:54] they're like F11 and G11 compared to our
[20:58] baseline sites and sites that have been
[21:00] restored where the water table is
[21:02] importantly,
[21:04] if you take an average of that, you take
[21:05] my word for it for now, is around 30 to
[21:08] 20 cm above just below the surface
[21:10] surface is up here. Whereas the drain
[21:13] sites on average are 60 for the year and
[21:16] they can go as low as 100 120.
[21:23] Now for those of you who've never seen
[21:25] or whatever flux towers are pretty
[21:27] simple if you just take the basic
[21:29] principle maybe you've never seen it
[21:31] maybe you know it well carbon flux gram
[21:34] CO2 per meter squared per day
[21:38] I'm showing you this because it's going
[21:39] to show you the very simple model I'm
[21:41] going to show you in two slides and then
[21:42] we'll be done with it. All you have to
[21:44] know is the zero line is the key line to
[21:48] follow. Blue is productivity. This is
[21:52] what ARR focuses on. This is the tree
[21:55] productivity. This is the plants are
[21:57] taking up CO2. The pink is so is
[22:02] respiration from everything. But what
[22:04] you make your money on or what you
[22:06] basically look your balance on on is the
[22:08] green which is net ecosystem exchange.
[22:11] That means we are capturing within a
[22:14] hectare everything that's growing,
[22:16] taking up, releasing and so forth.
[22:20] And if you accumulate that out over
[22:22] years, here's 20 21 so forth. Again, the
[22:25] same colors. Here's the plant
[22:27] productivity drawing it down negatively.
[22:30] These numbers are negative. That means
[22:32] that's the convention. This is the
[22:35] amount that was actually taken up by the
[22:37] plants and removed. But this is the
[22:39] amount that the ecosystem gave back at
[22:41] respiration. And the green line, you'll
[22:44] notice it's above the zero. It says on
[22:47] this drain site we actually
[22:51] have a balance of negative 21 metric
[22:55] tons per year. That means 21 tons is
[22:59] going into the atmosphere because it's a
[23:01] drain site.
[23:04] So we developed a model o over the whole
[23:08] site. I don't have time to show you
[23:09] that. But we look at carbon flux at
[23:10] different water tables. Tons of CO2 per
[23:13] hectare per year. Negative numbers
[23:15] indicate storage. Positive numbers
[23:18] indicate release. We have a simple model
[23:21] we use. We tried to use the European
[23:22] one. It didn't work very well. We tried
[23:24] multiple aspects of this. This is a
[23:27] simplified model that works really well
[23:28] with an R square of 73.
[23:32] Net ecosystem exchange, which is what we
[23:34] want, equals water table depth plus RG,
[23:37] which is the global radiation for that
[23:39] site. Easy to find there. Lots of
[23:41] weather stations around. So,
[23:45] This is the summary of it. If you keep
[23:47] the water table at 60 cmters, you're
[23:48] going to lose 21 metric tons per year
[23:52] per hectare. If you keep it at 40 to 50,
[23:55] you lose 13 7 two. If you if you keep it
[23:58] within this 20 range, you store three.
[24:02] So now we've got scientific basis to
[24:05] basically say what do we have to keep to
[24:07] maintain to scientifically verify
[24:09] whether or not we can sell credits. If
[24:12] you say, well, are these numbers
[24:13] realistic? This is an this is a
[24:15] wonderful paper if you've never read it
[24:17] by Evans at all, Nature 2021, and it is
[24:21] metadata of all the Eddie flux towers
[24:24] just about you can find, he could find,
[24:26] and it shows you both for tropical and
[24:28] for temperate European petlands the
[24:30] relationship between water table depth
[24:32] alone and just net ecosystem production.
[24:35] This this time it's just basically
[24:36] production. It's in carbon, not CO2. But
[24:39] our three, we have three locations that
[24:41] we tested. That's from our Picosen site.
[24:44] You can see they fall right within the
[24:46] region of the system.
[24:48] Yeah.
[24:50] All right. So now let's look at the
[24:52] impacts and let's see if we can actually
[24:54] figure out what's happening. So we
[24:56] wanted to assess the impact of this
[24:57] restoration.
[24:59] These are look very crude. We've got
[25:01] some brand new ones, but this is a
[25:03] called a flashboard riser where the
[25:04] water comes in from these canals and
[25:07] essentially you place boards, new boards
[25:09] in this case is what we're going to be
[25:10] doing. And it holds the water back and
[25:12] raises the water level. This is a liar
[25:14] picture that shows you an area where the
[25:17] canals where the water is. And this
[25:19] green areas in darker green is a model
[25:21] of the actual depth of water across the
[25:23] entire space.
[25:27] All right, so let's put the numbers back
[25:30] together. So if we have atmospheric
[25:32] release before restoration of 21.2
[25:36] that's on a drain site the water table
[25:38] is down here. If we actually look at the
[25:41] carbon save from entering the atmosphere
[25:44] after rewetting we basically can see
[25:46] that essentially we have a system where
[25:49] we what's preventing from entering the
[25:52] atmosphere is we're keeping this 21 down
[25:55] out and we're actually storing 3.3.
[25:59] So essentially if you add the two
[26:02] together we're getting 24 metric tons
[26:05] per hectare or 9.9 tons per acre. That
[26:10] is the number that is being used in the
[26:12] proarma for the carbon sale for this
[26:14] project.
[26:17] The problem now I'm going to show you
[26:18] the end of this the inversion the market
[26:21] value of reductions versus removals
[26:24] ignores ecological equivalency and
[26:26] climate impacts. So I've just showed you
[26:28] we have this magic 21 here from release
[26:31] of all the drain sites
[26:33] but you'll see over here when it comes
[26:35] into the actual dollar value it is
[26:37] considered either zero or very low in
[26:39] terms of purchases
[26:41] the money that we would get would be
[26:43] from the 3.3 which is the restor with
[26:46] removal that's considered the highest
[26:48] value $50 $75 a ton.
[26:52] If you put this on a perspective
[26:54] ecologically,
[26:56] here's what you have. I've just told you
[26:58] they're not going to buy or thinking
[27:00] about buying at a very low rate the the
[27:02] removals. But look it. So the drain
[27:05] Petland is putting out 90,000 tons per
[27:08] hectare 90,000 tons over this 4,000
[27:11] hectares every year. And we're with
[27:15] restoring we're storing 13,000. It's a
[27:18] complete imbalance. So, we're arguing to
[27:21] Microsoft and to Google and to these
[27:23] other ones. This is the bounce. Are you
[27:25] really wanting to do something for the
[27:27] atmosphere? Do you really want to have
[27:29] something that's going to be effective?
[27:34] So, I'll finish this up with showing
[27:35] you, can we scale this? So, we take that
[27:38] 21 number and we look at all of the uh
[27:41] drain petlands in North Carolina, South
[27:43] Carolina, Georgia, and Virginia. Most of
[27:46] them are in North Carolina of this type
[27:48] of petland. And we can see that if we
[27:51] look at that and we add up all and we
[27:53] use that value for the drained areas, we
[27:56] actually are releasing almost a million
[27:58] million and a half tons a year going
[28:00] into the atmosphere every day. Every
[28:01] year now with the drain ones and we have
[28:05] additional ones from drain lands. If
[28:08] they catch fire, we've estimated what
[28:10] this means. It adds an additional 1.6 to
[28:13] 2.8 million tons. So 2.6 to 4.4 four
[28:17] teroggrams
[28:19] of carbon could be actually worked on
[28:22] and and saved here if we actually could
[28:25] restore these systems. So in summary
[28:28] here, climate services from Bakosen
[28:30] carbon farms, we have 600,000 hectares
[28:33] of drain petlands in North Carolina.
[28:36] Each centimeter loss due to oxidations
[28:38] about 28 tons going into the atmosphere.
[28:41] Restoration of the available petlands
[28:44] easily 45 to 77,000 hectares along the
[28:47] southeast coast in our state alone could
[28:50] save 1 to2 million tons of CO2 entering
[28:53] the atmosphere. Now what is a scary what
[28:55] not scary what's a shocking number I did
[28:58] the calculations drain picosens comprise
[29:01] less than 01%
[29:03] of all the land in the US but by
[29:06] rewetting could reduce the US net
[29:09] emission goals by 2.4%.
[29:14] And 18% if they catch on fire.
[29:17] So they they're very small in area but
[29:19] they fight well above their weight.
[29:24] I wouldn't be I'd be remiss if I didn't
[29:26] tell you that we have a biodiversity
[29:28] team. We're spending a lot of money on
[29:30] biodiversity. At the same time, we've
[29:32] spent several 2.6 million restoring this
[29:35] site. The co- benefits increased
[29:38] regional biodiversity, maintaining some
[29:40] very rare and endangered species. This
[29:43] is a defense against saltwater coming in
[29:45] because the fresh water freshwater head
[29:47] on these Picosen systems are right next
[29:48] to the ocean and they prevent salt water
[29:50] from coming in. We've created some job
[29:53] uh creations in these really poor rural
[29:56] counties, economic increase and
[29:59] maintaining the tax base.
[30:01] So there are some of we have as I said
[30:03] the largest black bear population in the
[30:05] eastern United States. Uh we have wild
[30:08] turkey and deer and so forth and 60some
[30:11] species about 18 very rare. But we have
[30:14] also the largest wintering population of
[30:18] uh geese, ducks, swans, and almost a
[30:21] million birds per year come to this area
[30:23] in the winter.
[30:26] So, a lot of people supported this.
[30:28] Finally, Department of Energy and uh US
[30:31] Fish and Wildlife. But I'd be remissed
[30:33] by saying if I hadn't pointed out that
[30:35] we got some from Grantham Foundation,
[30:37] Rockefeller, but also this Pantheon
[30:40] Regeneration, which is a public benefit
[30:42] corporation, has been the engine behind
[30:44] making this project work. So, I feel as
[30:46] an ecologist, whether they never sold
[30:48] any credits or not, if they got it
[30:49] rewet, I'd be really pleased. They
[30:51] wouldn't be pleased, but I'd be pleased.
[30:56] And uh you can see there is a pot of
[30:58] gold somewhere behind us. We just got to
[30:59] find it. Thank you.