Climate Regulatory Services

Michael Totten, Chief Advisor, Climate, Freshwater & Ecosystem Services

Conservation International, mtotten@conservation.org
Chapter in forthcoming 2009 book, Our Giving Earth

Maintaining the Climate that Supports Life

Past emissions have already committed the world to at least 1° C of warming—sufficient
to dramatically alter the planet as we know it. The expected temperature increase of 2° to
3° has not been reached in three million years, when sea level was 25 to 35 meters higher
than today (Hansen et al., 2007). However, the most recent climate research indicates that
allowing a doubling to 550 parts per million (ppm) of carbon dioxide (CO2) poses a high
probability of a 6° Celsius temperature rise (Hansen et al., 2008). If humanity wants to
avert catastrophic, irreversible climate disasters, it needs to stabilize atmospheric
concentrations below 350 ppm (Hansen et al., 2007; Mathews and Caldeira, 2008).

The new insight that society must achieve a CO2 amount less than the current level is a
dramatic change from previous studies, which even most recently suggested that the
dangerous level of CO2 was likely to be 450 ppm or higher. The downward change is
caused by realization that “slow” feedback processes not included in most climate
models—such as ice melt and release of greenhouse gases (GHGs) by the soil,
permafrost, and ocean in a warming climate—can occur both remarkably quickly (such
as the sudden release of methane from melting permafrost) and on the time scale of
decades and centuries. This realization derives from both new paleoclimate data and
ongoing observations of global change, especially in the Polar Regions (Hansen et al.,
2008; Hansen et al., 2007).

Research connecting a rich diversity of disciplines and knowledge domains—notably in

earth systems sciences, complex adaptive systems, and ecosystem sciences—is resulting
in a veritable flood of critical insights (Canadell et al., 2007; IPCC, 2007; MEA, 2005;
Gunderson and Holling, 2001). Among the most impressive and important advancements
in this regard have been in understanding the climate regulatory system and the myriad
climate regulatory services resulting from the interactions of energy, materials, and
information flows through the geosphere, biosphere, and atmosphere. These climate
regulatory services ensure sustained well-being for humanity and life on Earth
(Schellnhuber et al., 2006).

Humanity’s vast infrastructure—now valued in hundreds of trillions of dollars in

financial, physical, social, and natural capital assets—depends immensely on the stable
sea level of the past several thousand years, the recurring seasonal hydrological cycles
and terrestrial rain patterns, the regularity of annual temperature cycles, vegetation
patterns, soil conditions and pollination systems, and the plentitude of other processes
spawned by the diverse climatically adapted natural ecosystems comprising the
biosphere.

The Climate Regulatory System

The multitude of recurring values and benefits from key components comprising the
climate regulatory system cover a vast range of spatial and temporal scales (Steffen et al.,
2005; Archer, 2008; Walker and Salt, 2006), and tremendous strides are being made in
mapping and modeling the climate system over time. Paleoclimate findings indicate that
relatively benign climate conditions enabled Homo sapiens to become settled farmers,
leading to the dawn of civilization. Indeed, civilization’s rapidly evolving and expanding
infrastructure and societal growth patterns were adapted to the climate zones of the post-
glacial Holocene epoch over the past 10,000 to 12,000 years.

The Holocene epoch, however, is now being superseded by what some are calling the
Anthropocene, in recognition of the planetary impacts the human era is triggering,
including changes to Earth’s climate regulatory services (Zalasiewicz et al., 2008;
Crutzen, 2002). A key indicator of this dramatic shift is “270 CO2e ppmv,” the
atmospheric concentration level of radiatively active trace gases (commonly known as
GHGs) over the past 10,000 years. The atmospheric global warming potential of these
various gases are standardized to CO2 equivalents in ppm volume given that CO2 is the
dominant gas (after water vapor).

GHGs are essential to maintaining the Earth’s temperature. Although comprising less
than 4/10,000th of one percent of total atmospheric gases (99% of which is comprised of
nitrogen and oxygen), without them the planet would be uninhabitable by the life forms
we recognize. In the absence of the greenhouse effect and an atmosphere, the Earth’s
average surface temperature of 14 °C could be as low as −18 °C. However, humanity’s
consumption of fossil fuels and deforestation over the past two centuries have been
steadily increasing the atmospheric concentration of CO2e, to roughly 385 ppmv by 2008.
Economic projections and business-as-usual development patterns this century would
emit several trillion more tons of CO2, pushing the concentration level towards 1000
ppmv and triggering catastrophic consequences.

The world’s marine phytoplankton, terrestrial forests, vegetation, and soils are major
players in the carbon cycle. Compared to the 700 billion tons of carbon in the
atmosphere, several times this amount is stored in forests, vegetation, and soils, and fifty
times more in the ocean. The top 100 meters of ocean contain thousands of microscopic
photosynthesizing phytoplankton in each drop of water. These microscopic organisms
absorb light energy and CO2, and convert this into organic molecules for driving their
metabolism and creating cellular structures. Through their rapid life-cycle process,
marine phytoplankton transfer more than 100 million tons of carbon per day from the
atmosphere and upper ocean to the deep sea and ocean sediments, accounting for half of
the global biological uptake of CO2. This “biological pump” effectively removes the
heat-trapping CO2 from the atmosphere for centuries to millions of years (Falkowski,
2002).

Regulating GHGs is also one of the most significant ecosystem services provided by
forests and soils today. The world’s four billion hectares of forests, roughly 30 percent of
them mature, old-growth forests, store an estimated 638 Petagrams (Pg, billion metric
tons) of carbon—roughly half in biomass and deadwood and half in soils and litter to a
depth of 30 centimeters (FAO, 2006). The soil carbon in northern peatlands and
permafrost, which only a few years ago were estimated to be 850 Pg, is now thought to
be double that. Lowland tropical peatlands contain upwards of 100 Pg of carbon deposits
as deep as 20 meters (Canadell et al., 2007).

How Much Is the Climate Regulating System Worth?

In a seminal assessment that calculated the annual value of global ecosystem services and
natural capital (Costanza et al., 1997a), the value of gas and climate regulatory services
provided by the world’s forests, mangroves, wetlands, grasslands, peatlands, and marine
phytoplankton were conservatively estimated in 2008 dollars at roughly US$3 trillion per
year. The climate service values are based on a marginal cost of carbon mitigation at
roughly US$8 per ton of CO2. These are partial valuations, given that the marginal
valuation methods may “dramatically underestimate the economic value of total forest
climate control services” (Costanza et al., 1997b).

Human activity is undermining the value of these climate services in direct and indirect
ways. Directly, the deforestation of roughly 14 million hectares per year, the vast
majority of it in the tropics, emits between five and eight billion tons of CO2 into the
atmosphere (IPCC, 2007). This is roughly 20 percent of total global annual CO2
emissions, more than is released by the world’s fleet of vehicles, trucks, railroads,
airplanes, and ships combined. Carbon emissions from tropical deforestation and forest
degradation, if not prevented, are expected to increase atmospheric CO2 concentration by
as much as 129 ppm in the decades ahead (Stern, 2006).

Indirectly, human-triggered CO2 emissions are acidifying the oceans, reducing the ability
of marine phytoplankton to absorb CO2 (Doney, 2006; Behrenfeld et al., 2006). Higher
temperatures are increasing the frequency and severity of wildfires, droughts, and pest
attacks and accelerating the mortality of millions of hectares of forests and the erosion of
soil carbon (Westerling et al., 2006; Page et al., 2002; Schimel and Baker, 2002; Lal,
2005).

Economists debate which valuation methodology is most appropriate to use in

determining planetary welfare and the social cost of carbon (e.g., marginal abatement
cost or marginal damage cost). The difference between the low and high cost estimates
can be more than two orders of magnitude (i.e., from several dollars to several hundred
dollars per ton of CO2). The lower marginal social cost estimates result from using a
narrower frame of reference that tends to minimize or exclude non-market damages,
equity concerns, and non-marginal damages (e.g., value of life or impacts on economies
beyond their ability to cope effectively with climatic perturbations) (Downing and
Watkiss, 2002).

More fundamental, however, is that while cost-benefit analyses (CBAs) producing

marginal cost estimates provide useful rankings of the cost-effectiveness and risk profiles
for a range of mitigation options, they do not consider long-term catastrophic impacts
occurring over multi-century and multi-millennia timeframes. A significant fraction of
CO2 emissions remain in the atmosphere and accumulate over geological time spans of
tens to hundreds of thousands of years, raising the lurid, but real threat of extinction of
most life on Earth. From this vantage point, CBAs are “especially and unusually
misleading,” and a more illuminating and constructive analysis would be determining the
level of “catastrophe insurance” needed: “rough comparisons could perhaps be made with
the potentially huge payoffs, small probabilities, and significant costs involved in
countering terrorism, building anti-ballistic missile shields, or neutralizing hostile
dictatorships possibly harboring weapons of mass destruction… A crude natural metric
for calibrating cost estimates of climate-change environmental-insurance policies might
be that the U.S. already spends approximately 3% of national income on the cost of a
clean environment” (Weitzman, 2008).

Getting Our Climate Back

Ultimately, climate stabilization at any level can only be achieved if net global CO2
emissions decline to the level of persistent natural sinks (i.e., absorption by forests, soils,
and marine phytoplankton). This amounts to about one Pg of carbon per year, or just a
few percent of today’s emissions (House et al., 2008). This poses a challenge
unprecedented in human history: essentially growing the current $40 trillion annual
global economy by two to three percent per year while swiftly moving to near zero
emissions, while also phasing out existing coal plants (which annually emit 11 Pg CO2)
and halting global deforestation (which annually emits 5 to 8 Pg CO2).

Several decades of evidence-based results by individuals, communities, cities, states, and

nations around the world have demonstrated best practices, policies, and regulations for
improving human welfare without increasing GHGs. Herculean as it may seem, if these
efforts were expanded to a global scale in the coming several decades, it would be
possible to defuse the time bomb of climate catastrophe. And, quite to the contrary of
pessimistic arguments that this would cripple economic growth, taking advantage of the
immense pool of cost-effective options for reducing and preventing CO2 emissions while
growing a “greener” economy offers the best hope of simultaneously resolving two other
unprecedented challenges of global and historical magnitude: more absolute poor than
any time in human history and the sixth-largest species extinction spasm in the history of
life on Earth (Mittermeier et al., 2008; McKinsey, 2007; Eliasch, 2008; Strassburg et al.,
2008).

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