CO2 ABSORPTION AS THE NEXT ENVIRONMENTAL TASK FOR FORESTRY AND AGRICULTURE

The unpleasantly conspicuous set-aside areas of individual farmers currently defacing our countryside are sources of increasing irritation not only to the farmers themselves and the rural population, but also to nature-lovers and all those who seek recreation in the countryside. Since the majority of these relics of former cultivation display little diversity in the species they support, and are usually saturated with nutrients, neither wild flowers nor anything else of value for nature protection or landscape conservation can grow there. On the other hand, widespread complaints are heard, especially from the organisations and associations concerned with environmental protection, about the greenhouse effect generated by the combustion of fossil fuels, and terrifying scenarios based on the spread of the deserts and world-wide flooding of coastal regions are being presented as the consequences of subsequent climatic change. In this situation, it would appear vital that farming - especially for reasons of environmental protection, but also of nature protection and landscape conservation - should be given a new, additional social task now that it has fulfilled, and for years now exceeded, the task given it when the EC was founded of securing our food supplies, thus releasing increasing areas of ground for other purposes. The new task ought then to be to counteract the greenhouse effect by creating biomass to absorb maximum quantities of CO2, the gas which causes this effect. The short study under review is devoted to this topic and contains a practicable concept for achieving this purpose. This also justifies the greatly abbreviated presentation by the author of what are actually the much more complex carbon cycles which take place after photosynthesis, and the limitation of his concept to the measurable biomass produced from basic agriculture and forestry practice in the former Federal Republic of Germany. Any extension to include pan-European conditions would immediately involve supplementary calculations for wine, fruit, olives and rice cultivation. Extrapolation to areas outside Europe, or even taking the world as a whole, if possible at all, would entail considerable modifications. Thus, for instance, the high degree of CO2 absorption caused through paddy-field rice cultivation in the tropics is offset by the quantities of the greenhouse gas methane (CH4) liberated.