Is Sustainable Growth Possible? The Challenge of Reconciling an Increasing Human Population and a Neutral Carbon Balance
A special issue of Sustainability (ISSN 2071-1050). This special issue belongs to the section "Environmental Sustainability and Applications".
Deadline for manuscript submissions: closed (31 October 2021) | Viewed by 4764
Special Issue Editor
Interests: carbon and water biogeochemical cycles; ecosystem ecology; climate change
Special Issues, Collections and Topics in MDPI journals
Special Issue Information
Dear Colleagues,
The current climate crisis, determined by the anthropogenic change of the atmospheric composition, requires rapid and coordinated actions by society. However, from the scientific community, a clear pathway towards its solution has not yet been established.
There are two different perspectives that can be considered for this solution, namely: One is biogeochemical, related to the balance between absorbed and released carbon dioxide, alongside with other GHGs. The second is human-related, involving the dynamics of the human population and its propensity to consume.
From the one side, the terrestrial ecosystem capacity of absorbing the main greenhouse gas, CO2, largely exceeds the current imbalance. It is a scientific priority to understand the driving variables determining the balance between CO2 assimilation and release to various ecosystems, and to what extent the human activity can influence and possibly improve the terrestrial sink capacity.
On the other side, the human population is still growing at a very high rate, with some evidence of decline in wide regions, but other evidence of unprecedented levels of increase in other areas, with the potential of offsetting and reversing the ongoing climate policies.
This Special Issue aims to collect current knowledge and modeling studies about the carbon-use efficiency in natural and human-managed ecosystems, and new proposals aimed at increasing the long-term capacity of the terrestrial ecosystem to sequester carbon, through practices like biochar or new methods. To reach the expected results, these modeling efforts and new proposals should be contextualized in the perspective of human population dynamics.
Prof. Dr. Leonardo Montagnani
Guest Editor
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Keywords
- Biogeochemical cycles
- Carbon dioxide
- Increasing human population
- Terrestrial sink capacity
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