The United Nations Environment Programme released a report last Friday for World Environment Day titled "The Natural Fix? The Role of Ecosystems in Climate Mitigation." In it, UNEP makes the case for investing in protecting fragile ecosystems as a form of carbon mitigation instead of carbon capture and storage technology. The report highlights the ways in which nature is better at regulating carbon than CCS through the carbon cycle and how preserving nature's role in carbon regulation will bring greater and cheaper benefits.

The report explains that the priority ecosystems to protect are tropical forests and peatlands. Reducing deforestation by 50 percent by 2050 could prevent the release of 50 gigatonnes of carbon into the atmosphere this century, which meets 12 percent of the emission reduction recommendation by the IPCC. Peatland restoration could prevent the release of up to 0.8 gigatonnes of carbon per year.

The other main area that the report devotes attention to is agriculture. UNEP believes the agriculture sector could be be mostly carbon neutral by 2030 if necessary policies are adopted, therefore preventing the release of 2 gigatonnes of carbon per year.

The report calls for governments to draft carbon management policies that rely more on ecosystem protection and restoration and less on funding CCS technologies, particularly during the upcoming climate convention in Copenhagen.
You can access the full PDF of the report here.

According to the Global Trends in Sustainable Energy Investment 2009 report released by the United Nations Environment Programme, clean energy companies received $155 billion in investments in 2008, four times as much as in 2004.

That's the good news. The not so good news is that with the economic downturn, that upward trend has decreased in recent months. Investments in the second half of 2008 were down by 17 percent compared to the first half and down 23 percent compared to the last half of 2007. Clean energy investments in 2008 still topped 2007 overall though.

Some of the finer points of the report include:

• Wind had the highest investment in 2008 at $51.8 billion.
• Solar grew the most in new investments with $33.5 billion, a 49 percent increase over 2007.
• Geothermal investments (new and continuing) grew the most in 2008 with an increase of 149 percent.
• Biofuel investments decreased by 9 percent to $16.9 billion.
• Wind and solar costs are dropping because of the surge of investments and increase in production. Solar PV modules are expected to drop in cost by 49 percent this year.
• Developing countries are leading the pack in investment growth with a 27 percent increase over 2007, while Europe and North America saw stalling investments in 2008.
• Government packages are crucial to continued growth in clean energy investment as annual investments need to reach half a trillion dollars by 2020 to meet the recommendations of the IPCC.

You can access the full report here.

via Live Science