The American Carbon Registry (ARC) is part of Winrock International, a philanthropic, nonprofit organization that works to empower disadvantaged communities, increase economic opportunities, and sustain natural resources.
Specifically, the ARC was founded in 1996 as the first voluntary greenhouse gas registry in the world. It utilizes market forces to make it economically advantageous to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
This week, the ARC presented a number of leading individuals and organizations with awards to recognize their important contributions to curbing greenhouse gas emissions, and so work to limit the impacts of global warming.
One of the awards presented was the Innovation Award that recognizes efforts that are based on ACR’s guiding principles of innovation, quality and excellence. This year, the Innovation Award went to a group of organizations that helped to create a carbon registry methodology for the restoration of California deltaic and coastal wetlands. The lead agency among those organizations was the Sacramento-San-Joaquin Delta Conservancy!
Here is an excerpt from the ARC’s award announcement. The full announcement can be found here.
“The Innovation award was presented to the developers of two landmark methodologies, one for California wetland restoration and the other for the transition to low global warming potential foams.
ACR honored the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta Conservancy as the lead agency, HydroFocus as the lead author and both U.C. Berkeley and Tierra Resources for technical support for the development of the methodology for the Restoration of California Deltaic and Coastal Wetlands. Funding for the methodology was provided by the California Coastal Conservancy, Department of Water Resources, U.S. Department of Energy, U.S. Department of Agriculture, the Metropolitan Water District and the Sacramento Municipal Utility District (SMUD).
In the San Francisco Bay Area, more than 90 percent of historic tidal wetlands disappeared in the last 150 years. Over 2.5 billion cubic meters of organic soils have disappeared since delta islands were first diked and drained for agriculture in the late 1800s, resulting in land subsidence up to 25 feet below sea level. Drained and cultivated organic soils in the delta continue to oxidize, subside and emit an estimated one to two million metric tons of CO2-equivalent annually — equal to annual emissions from over 300,000 passenger vehicles.
“We have been pleased to work with ACR and other partners on this methodology and appreciate the recognition,” said Steve Deverel, president of HydroFocus. “Restoration activities that rebuild subsided lands are critical to long-term ecosystem sustainability, are important to reducing the risk of levy failure and sea level rise, and are a significant source of GHG emissions reductions.”
“State and federal funding remains insufficient to address land subsidence that threatens the California water system, and carbon market revenues could help fill the funding gap,” added Campbell Ingram, executive officer of the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta Conservancy. ”The new ACR methodology provides an incentive to landowners in the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta, Suisun Marsh and other historically natural wetland areas in California to convert their most subsided and marginal agricultural lands to wetlands, or to produce wetlands crops such as rice, which will stop land subsidence and reverse it over time.” “
On April 7th, 2012, I published my first blog post on ABirdingNaturalist on Swainson’s Hawks returning to their breeding territory. With the Swainson’s Hawks once again returning to central California, it is time for the annual review. Over the last five years, that first post was followed by 193 more. Those posts have been viewed by over 24,000 people from 131 countries around the world.
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