Callum Roberts is Professor of Marine Conservation at the University of Exeter in the UK. His research focuses on threats to marine life and on finding the means to protect them. Here, he discusses our love-hate relationship with carbon - the giver of life and architect of our demise.
Carbon is the fourth most abundant element in the universe and the basis of all life on Earth. We wouldn’t be here without it. If life exists on other planets, it is probably carbon based. But carbon is also the cause of our unfolding planetary troubles and might be the architect of our undoing.
Carbon’s role in climate change is established beyond doubt. Carbon dioxide (CO2) and methane (CH4) are potent greenhouse gases produced by fossil fuel-based industries and modern agriculture, trapping solar heat and driving planetary warming.
The aspiration of the Paris Agreement to contain that warming to 1.5oC has been cruelly shattered in the past two years in a sudden temperature surge that we have yet to fully explain.
What is clear is that we have overshot safe levels of carbon emissions and all pathways to a more stable and sustainable future require putting some of that carbon back into safe places. While we theorise and experiment with geoengineering methods of extraction and storage, nature remains our strongest ally in carbon removal.
Nature’s carbon stores on land, like forests, peat bogs, and permafrost are reasonably well understood and already included in net zero pathways. But our understanding of ocean carbon capture and storage lags far behind. This is paradoxical considering the sea takes up more than double the amount of carbon absorbed by land every year, and collectively ocean carbon stores are vastly bigger than those on land.
When it comes to harnessing the power of the ocean to slow climate change, we have two urgent priorities: how can we keep stored carbon out of harm’s way, and can we turbocharge nature’s ability to take up more?
These questions are at the heart of the Convex Seascape Survey, a five-year international effort to understand carbon storage on the Earth’s continental shelves. Continental shelves, as their name suggests, are shallow (< 200m) submarine extensions of landmasses that extend from a few to more than a hundred miles offshore. Although they cover only about 7% of the sea, these shelves are disproportionately valuable to us, producing 95% of the world’s seafood and supporting most of our offshore industries.
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