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Climate Now Episode 53

April 25, 2022

Buried treasure: Unearthing the power of the soil carbon bank

Featured Experts

Asmeret Asefaw Berhe
Director of the Office of Science, U.S. Department of Energy

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Asmeret Asefaw Berhe

Director of the Office of Science, U.S. Department of Energy

Dr. Asmeret Asefaw Berhe is the Director of the Office of Science for the U.S. Department of Energy. Dr. Berhe is currently on leave from the University of California, Merced where she holds the Ted and Jan Falasco Chair in Earth Sciences and Geology; is a Professor of Soil Biogeochemistry; and served as Associate Dean for Graduate Education. Her research focus lies at the intersection of soil science, global change science, and political ecology with an emphasis on how the soil system regulates the earth’s climate and the dynamic two-way relationship between the natural environment and human communities.

She previously served as the Chair of the U.S. National Committee on Soil Science and member of the Board of International Scientific Organizations at the National Academies; Leadership board member for the Earth Science Women’s Network; and founding a co-principal investigator in the ADVANCEGeo Partnership – a National Science Foundation funded effort to empower scientists to respond to and prevent harassment, discrimination, bullying, and other exclusionary behaviors in research environments.

In this Episode

Soil – that mixture of degraded bedrock, decomposing organic matter, and microorganisms that nourishes the root systems of plants and trees – already holds twice as much CO2 as the earth’s atmosphere and vegetation, combined. And by changing how we manage our soils, we can increase the rate of CO2 trapping from the atmosphere into that soil carbon bank, and in some cases simultaneously enhance the agricultural productivity of a region.

Dr. Asmeret Asefaw Berhe, Professor of Soil Biogeochemistry and Falasco Chair in Earth 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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