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	Podcast:		Climate Now
	Episode:		Buried treasure: Unearthing the power of the soil carbon bank
	Category:		Science & Medicine
	Duration:		00:29:22
	Publish Date:		2022-04-25 22:00:00
	Description:		Nothing says you are committed to taking action on climate change like a promise to plant more trees, or so it seems from the hundreds of businesses and nations that headline reforestation commitments in their decarbonization strategies. BUT, it turns out putting carbon back under our feet might have way more potential than putting it back in the canopy. That's because soil - that mixture of degraded bedrock, decomposing organic matter, and microorganisms, that nourishes the root systems of plants and trees - already has a soil carbon bank 4x that of vegetation. And, by changing how we manage our soils, it is possible to increase their capacity for trapping CO2 in the form of organic carbonand enhance the agricultural productivity of a region. Dr. Asmeret Asefaw Berhe, Professor of Soil Biogeochemistry and Falasco Chair in Earth Sciences in the Department of Life and Environmental Sciences at University of California, Merced, is a global leader in the carbon storage potential of soils. She sat down with Climate Now to explain why soils are so good at trapping carbon, how much they could hold, and what we can do to increase soil carbon storage.
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