2008 AGU Fall Meeting
December 15-19, 2008
The Moscone Center
West and North Buildings
Howard Street
San Francisco, CA
Conference Information

The Fall Meeting is expected to draw a crowd of over 15,000 geophysicists from around the world. The Fall Meeting provides an opportunity for researchers, teachers, students, and consultants to present and review the latest issues affecting the Earth, the planets, and their environments in space. This meeting will cover topics in all areas of Earth and space sciences.

Scientific Abstracts from the Center:

Understanding Human Decision Making as a Driver for Carbon Sequestration on Land
by Lisa Dilling and Betsy Failey
As society begins to grapple with reducing the concentration of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases in the atmosphere in order to address climate change, policy discussions have emerged on the role of land use as a means to sequester carbon. Land use is already a key player in the global carbon budget through manipulations of vegetation and soils for agriculture and forestry. At the heart of land use is human decision making. The land use pattern and its attendant carbon impacts are a manifestation of a complex set of policy, economic, and cultural drivers that are channeled and expressed through individuals making decisions about land use. In order to understand the current pattern of carbon fluxes on managed land, and any future potential for land use to play a greater role in sequestering carbon, it is essential to understand the drivers of land use decision making at different scales, and their intersection with new imperatives and opportunities coming from climate mitigation goals. To this end, we have conducted a case study on land use decision making in the U.S. state of Colorado, a western state with significant portions of land managed by U.S. Federal governmental agencies in addition to privately-owned agricultural, grazing and forested lands. Our main goal was to put together a first-order look at the types of decision makers involved in managing land, what influences their decisions, and how the potential for storage of additional carbon on land might vary according to ownership category and land vegetation type. Our study has three significant components: 1. examining ownership patterns; 2. calculating the flux and carbon storage by land ownership category; and 3. illuminating the influences on land use decisions at different scales. In this paper, we will report the preliminary results of GIS work examining carbon fluxes by ownership category and the potential for additional storage of carbon based on policy and economic incentives.

Management of carbon across sectors and scales: Insights from land use decision making
by Lisa Dilling and Betsy Failey
Carbon management is increasingly becoming a topic of interest among policy circles and business entrepreneurs alike. In the United States, while no binding regulatory framework exists, carbon management is nonetheless being pursued both by voluntary actions at a variety of levels, from the individual to the national level, and through mandatory policies at state and local levels. Controlling the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere for climate purposes will ultimately require a form of governance that will ensure that the actions taken and being rewarded financially are indeed effective with respect to the global atmosphere on long time scales. Moreover, this new system of governance will need to interface with existing governance structures and decision criteria that have been established to arbitrate among various societal values and priorities. These existing institutions and expressed values will need to be examined against those proposed for effective carbon governance, such as the permanence of carbon storage, the additionality of credited activities, and the prevention of leakage, or displacement of prohibited activities to another region outside the governance boundary. The latter issue suggests that interactions among scales of decision making and governance will be extremely important in determining the ultimate success of any future system of carbon governance. The goal of our study is to understand the current context of land use decision making in different sectors and examine the potential for future carbon policy to be effective given this context. This study examined land use decision making in the U.S. state of Colorado from a variety of ownership perspectives, including US Federal land managers, individual private owners, and policy makers involved in land use at a number of different scales. This paper will report on the results of interviews with land managers and provide insight into the policy context for carbon management through land use. The study also examined the role of information in making decisions, and we will report some interesting contrasts between Federal and private land owner practices. Implications for science policy and the provision of useful information for decision making will be discussed.