Carbon mitigation involves a range of strategies designed to reduce the net emissions of carbon to the atmosphere.  Biologically-based carbon mitigation strategies fall into three general areas:  carbon management (for example through the altered management of agricultural soils, crop residues, or forest harvests), carbon sequestration through land use change (for example through the conversion of marginal agricultural land to forests or wetlands), and the use of biofuels.  The ability of the United States to enter into international agreements to reduce net C emissions will depend partly on technology and understanding of each of these strategies and their potential effects on emissions reductions.  The idea to grow more trees sounds simple, but forest industries depend on timber flow from currently managed forests, and the effectiveness of C sequestration through afforestation of addition land will depend on soil and vegetation history as well as compete with other land uses. 

Bioenergy and biofuels are an important and rapidly growing type of bio-based C mitigation.  The production of ethanol has doubled in the past 10 years, and US states and other nations are striving to adopt renewable portfolio standards for generation of electricity.  Germany, for example, has committed to generating 20% of its electricity from renewable sources by the year 2020.  Researchers in Canada are studying the effectiveness of growing poplar trees for production of cellulosic ethanol and the impact that it will have as a loss of fiber for the forest-products industry.  In her 2008 State of the State address, Michigan governor Granholm emphasized the potential for production of biofuels from Michigan forests (including the production of cellulosic ethanol from forest-products waste).  In a recent case study in China, researchers used satellite remote sensing to identify biomass production areas, together with an analysis of transportation costs to select a construction site for bioenergy production.  

The link between bioenergy and C mitigation is a complex and important link to explore.  A recent scientific article in Science (Fargione et al. 2008) estimated that the clearing of land in Southeast Asia, Brazil, and the US is creating a “biofuel carbon debt by releasing 17 to 420 times more CO₂ than the annual greehnhouse gas (GHG) reductions that these biofuels would provide by displacing fossil fuels.”  The abilty to analyze and understand this type of analysis in the context of GHG mitigation will be a key skill for SNRE students to gain, and providing the tools and understanding needed to conduct such an analysis will be one of the primary goals of this course.