Congress hears from experts on state of gclimate crisis

Thank you chair woman for holding this hearing and thank you to all of our witnesses. climate science should inform federal action Science and research should guide us forward and be the foundation for action and as we know all too well in action is incredibly costly. there is a cost to inaction so Doctor Michael We thank you for your testimony. on how lands can be an important climate solution. Can you give us a sense of either the global or US potential of land use to be a net sync? Of greenhouse gas emissions. Yeah. When we talk about land we talked about land is being both a source and a sink, so we do generate some greenhouse gas emissions from the land sector and we can be reducing those but the great advantage is that since capacity and that is can make up for some of our missions and other sectors. As I said in my written testimony, it can't make up for everything but it can help us get to some of these targets that we want to achieve. so I mentioned, for example that natural climate solutions can get us A. Way towards goals of reducing emissions by 2030, very quickly and what those entail are basically using our natural resources like soil and forest and Grassland, said so forth and reducing any emissions that are coming from there and encouraging their capacity. So our report talks about a number of those actions that have a substantial ability to bite into those carbon emissions. And so in our report, we layout things that have on the order of potential three gigatons. Going up to 2050 and those include increasing soil carbon sequestration and includes tackling global deforestation, preventing that land use conversion of high carbon lands like wetlands and peatlands that contribute to the problem. We lose their sink capacity. So if we do things better in terms of conserving natural lands, increasing soil health, improving our agricultural lands, that's going to get us a pretty substantial chunk of carbon emissions. They're not insignificant and they often come at low. That's the bonus. Thank you Doctor Stelter. We often hear that the Arctic is a hot spot for climate warming. In fact, in a recent briefing, I learned that rapidly rising Arctic air temperatures are throwing soil that has been frozen for millennia and because of that the Arctic is undergoing massive landscaped scale change. Do these changes impact the ability for excuse me for land to sequester carbon. The warmer soils lead to microbe microbes in the soil using the carbon that's there, and though the plants are growing more, they can't grow at a rate that pulls enough carbon in to balance what is moving out from the microbes using the the the carbon that's in the soil. The other piece of the Arctic stories is a part of a lot of land use of land change, and that's when places get. They burn and burned places don't have the vegetation to be the carbon pump that year or the next year, Tundra landscapes can regrow they take much longer than forest to regrow. So if we wanna make the most out of our agricultural and forest sectors as climate solutions, it seems to me we need to get to work immediately. miss Franson the 2019 UAP emissions Gap report. which you were leader author describes opportunities to enhance the ambition and action the climate crisis. specifically the contributions of G 20 members directly addresses the Gtwenty stating Gtwenty members urgently need to step up their commitments on ambitious climate action. What do you project will be the effects of other Gtwenty Nations of the United States Adopts an ambitious nationally determined contributions in order to meet its long term strategy. Thank. historically, the US has been able to play a constructive role internationally through diplomatic efforts engaging countries like China around making climate change commitments. So we saw this in the lead up to the Paris agreement where through US diplomacy. China came to the table and committed to peak its emissions by 2030. They're now on track to peak in advance of that so I think that as well as many other examples show that when the US is engaged on this issue as a leader. Play a strong and constructive role in bringing other countries to the table and getting good rules in place internationally that promote transparency accountability robust market mechanisms and so on to solve this problem, Thank you with that Madam Jerry yield back.