Over the past 150 years as agriculture has increasingly industrialised, huge tonnages of organic matter (carbon) have been depleted from our soils. It is our mission to start putting much of that back. At COP 21, a group of French scientists proposed a project called 4 per mille when they calculated that if all the world`s soils increased organic matter levels by 0.4% per year, they are capable of sequestering all anthropological CO2. A big, bold ask BUT it can be done and we intend to turbo charge that process in the UK.
Many farmers are already practicing regenerative agriculture but we intend to go a stage further and ask farmers to grow the crop Lucerne specifically for CO2 capture. We hear of all sorts of high-tech solutions but at Re-Generation Earth we feel that the process of CO2 capture and storage should remain the natural process that it has been for millions of years and to utilise plants to do the work for us.
We are setting out to plant large areas of one of the world’s fastest growing trees, a sterile hybrid of the Paulownia to rapidly sequester significant amounts of carbon for generations to come. The resultant timber will be harvested and manufactured into a range of products and construction materials in order to lock the carbon away for generations to come.
No Re-Generation Earth planted tree will be intentionally burnt. Brush wood will either be chipped and returned to the soil or turned into Biochar.
Bank Farm near Ashford in Kent will be among the first to develop a range of habitats to enable local biodiversity to thrive. From the smallest insects to the largest indigenous mammals, many species need a helping hand and your subscription will help to make that happen.
Land committed to the project will be taken out of food production forever to protect its status once the habitats are established. A fund will also be set up to ensure that should additional management be required in the future then that management will be funded.
Schools and local institutions will be able to apply for grants from Re-Generation Earth to install apparatus to reduce CO2 outputs and to improve energy efficiency. From LED light bulbs to solar panels and battery storage, a range of projects will help to reduce C02 emissions.
The simple fact is that the best way to offset CO2 is to leave it in the form of coal, oil and gas and there needs to be a massive investment in renewable energy and an electrification of our entire system.
More energy hits the earth from the sun in a single day than is used by mankind in a whole year. It doesn’t require us to capture and store much of that energy to displace the entire requirement of all fossil fuels.