Direct cooling of the planet

Walter Jehne spoke in Whangarei on 2 March at NorthTec’s Te Puna o te Matauranga marae. He was inspirational and all the feedback I have heard from his audience has been very positive. We will make video of his presentation available soon. If you are not familiar with Walter’s message, read about it here.

Photo credit: Nina Matenga

The climate solution is bigger than CO2

For me, Walter’s key message is the role of the hydrological cycle in cooling the planet. He tells us that CO2 drives 4% of the heat dynamics of the planet. So focusing on emissions reductions and sequestration is like taking a knife to a gun fight – and its a short knife that is pretty blunt. The hydrological cycle accounts for a massive 95% of the heat dynamics.

I am a fan of Project Drawdown because it expanded my thinking about the range of solutions available for mitigating global warming. The fact that food (31%) and land use (14%) accounted for 45% of the Drawdown solutions is especially significant for Northland. If we achieve the drawdown Paul Hawken advocates we could start to reduce CO2 levels by 2050. We could still do all of that stuff, but acting on Walter’s guidance we can achieve it so much sooner. This includes big global projects like reversing desertification that will require research, action and (the hardest task of all), collective will.

Implications for us

Walter told us that in his city, Canberra, the temperature in urban areas with lots of trees can be up to 12 degrees cooler than areas close by with little greenery. So if I can cool my little patch of earth down, surely that aggregates to cooling the whole planet?

What can we do in Tai Tokerau? This page from theNorthland Regional Council establishes Northland’s land area as 1.4 million hectares. Of that 52% is pasture. If we remove rivers estuaries and lakes from this equation, there are four types of cover that make up 95% of our land cover.

Land cover class	Class hectares	percentage
Pasture	735,400	53.2%
Indigenous forest	268,740	19.4%
Exotic forest	187,550	13.6%
Mixed indigenous shrubland	122,760	8.9%

Table 1: Adapted from Northland Regional Council 

Lets take a closer look at each of these and explore how they could contribute to cooling.

Pasture

As stewards of 53% of our land cover, farmers have potential to be the stand-out heroes in our quest to cool the planet. So some of us have to stop hating on them and support the farmers who are leading the way with regenerative farming practices.

And by the way, Walter blew the methane argument out of the water. Actively growing pasture produces hydroxyl ions as water evaporates. Hydroxyl oxidises methane, and healthy pasture will produce about 100 times the amount of hydroxyl required for that oxidation. So Walter suggests that if you were to get a bill for methane emissions, send back a return invoice for your hydroxyl production.

Farmers can do many things to support cooling, focused on building the soil sponge (getting carbon into the ground) diversifying pasture and including more trees in the farm landscape.Our case studies of Northland farmers reveal how they are achieving this.  Please share examples of farmers who are doing this.

The other heroes are the ruminants who convert pasture into fertiliser, the pasture species that produce the sugars that feed the soil building microbiome.

Photo credit: Linda Matson

We can help regenerative farmers by buying their product directly and encouraging policy change to make regenerative farming the gold standard. This includes agencies such as MPI who offer no tangible assistance to regenerative projects.

Indigenous forest and mixed indigenous shrubland

Our forests are struggling with exotic pests consuming tonnes of foliage daily, the incursion of exotic weed species and the early impacts of climate change. Extending them, and removing pest species will help to enhance their cooling potential. All of those people in land care groups are helping directly.

Also helping is the Northland Totara Working Group. They are promoting full canopy cover forestry by selectively logging totara on farms and managing totara stands for a sustainable harvest.

Parihaka in Whangarei

Exotic forests

Pines are vilified, but they are better than me at sequestering carbon. I am not sure what their cooling potential is, but that is for us to find out. They cover 13.6% of our land. How much more space should they have? Are there other species we can plant to diversify the productive landscape.

Homes, urban areas and roadsides

We can all contribute, perhaps simply by letting our lawns grow a little longer, returning the clippings directly to the land and planting more trees, vines and shrubs. Since Walter mentioned deep-rooted vines as especially good for cooling, I noticed a lot of stark and ugly wire mesh fences in Whangarei. Perhaps our councils can ramp up the provision of spaces for planting campaigns? And perhaps we could have more roadside planting? There are long straight stretches of road, where trees wouldn’t obstruct visibility and might shade the asphalt that gets so hot in the summer. If we ran out of straight road, would you be averse to reducing the speed limit to compensate for possible reductions in visibility – or would that be too inconvenient?

Some goals for a cooler Tai Tokerau

1. Achieve policy support for transitioning all Tai Tokerau pasture to regenerative stewardship by the 2020 election.
2. Achieve 100% regenerative pasture stewardship by 2030.
3. Crowdsource public funds and labour to support appropriate tree planting on farms.
4. Secure resources and public support for the eradication of forest pests.
5. Extend coverage of indigenous forest from 268,740 hectares to 300,000 hectares by 2030.
6. Establish roadside plantings for 200 km of road by 2030.
7. Identify areas of public land that can be planted.
8. Provide property owners with the knowledge required to cool their properties.

Any more suggestions?

Walter talking the the whare hui. Photo credit Nina Matenga

Thanks again Walter. Who would have thought that it is Australian saving the world?