Herd of 170 bison could help store CO2 equivalent of almost 2M cars (Romania)(theguardian.com)
theguardian.com
Herd of 170 bison could help store CO2 equivalent of almost 2M cars (Romania)
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/article/2024/may/15/bison-romania-tarcu-2m-cars-carbon-dioxide-emissions-aoe
3 comments
How are bison different compared to grazing cattle? I am not thinking of factory farmed where dung and urine are getting mixed together (if I remember correctly, that combination causes some reaction that is particularly climate-unfriendly?).
Rather, imagine the kind of large herds in Argentina, Paraguay... So cows that eat grass and poop randomly in the wild, not cows that get rainforest soy / endless amounts of cereals.
Do they have different biology, different interactions? Or is a numeric thing, where after a certain point the effect flips and they become a net "negative" (maybe required infrastructure, all the activities surrounding it rather than the animals themselves)?
Or is it actually so that grazing cattle and bison have similar effects, and the old "raising animals is very bad for the climate" is not universally true (and should be corrected to "some ways of raising animals are bad for the climate" or "raising animals is bad for its pollutants")?
I am confused!
Do they have different biology, different interactions? Or is a numeric thing, where after a certain point the effect flips and they become a net "negative" (maybe required infrastructure, all the activities surrounding it rather than the animals themselves)?
Or is it actually so that grazing cattle and bison have similar effects, and the old "raising animals is very bad for the climate" is not universally true (and should be corrected to "some ways of raising animals are bad for the climate" or "raising animals is bad for its pollutants")?
I am confused!
Bison, not cows...
At least until they figure out that Bison are edible too.
At least until they figure out that Bison are edible too.
> "This corresponds to the yearly CO2 emissions of 1.88m average US petrol cars."
and
> "The latest research, which has not been peer-reviewed, used a new model developed by scientists at the Yale School of the Environment and funded by the Global Rewilding Alliance. It calculates the additional amount of atmospheric CO2 that wildlife species help to capture and store in soils through their interactions within ecosystems. The European bison herd grazing in an area of nearly 50 sq km of grasslands within the wider Țarcu mountains, was found to potentially capture an additional 2m tonnes of carbon a year. That is nearly 9.8 times more than without the bison – although the report authors noted the 9.8 figure could be up to 55% higher or lower, given the uncertainty around the median estimate."
They also suggest the 170 may be added to in the near future, increasing up to 350-450 bison (or perhaps that's their estimate of natural growth / population limit?)
Edit - it's the latter, quote from https://rewildingeurope.com/news/boost-for-growing-bison-pop... :
> "For a bison population to become genetically viable, it needs to reach 150 mature individuals, which means a total population of around 350 to 400 animals. If the population in the Southern Carpathians continues expanding at a similar rate, it is estimated that it will number between 350 and 450 individuals by 2030, although this is a ballpark figure."