Israel will play a leading global role in climate technologies, especially in reducing emissions in agriculture and in removing and storing carbon, the UN’s chief designer of a universal carbon trading market said at the first Israeli conference on carbon capture on Thursday.
Special guest Perumal Arumugam told dozens of innovators, government officials, scientists, investors and representatives of not-for-profit organizations that the carbon capture sector had a “big future” and that Israel could be a market leader.
“Don’t wait for new rules. Start now, it’s about learning through doing,” he said.
Carbon capture refers to technologies meant to remove excess carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and either reuse it in industrial processes or store it for a long time. It can be removed by restoring natural systems that would normally absorb carbon dioxide, or by developing technology to capture the gas from the air.
Earlier this year, the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change made clear that carbon removal is essential if the world is to meet the Paris Agreement’s climate goals of keeping global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit), compared with pre-industrial times, and if governments and companies are to meet their low or net-zero pledges.
Technologies for carbon capture and storage, also known as sequestration, are at an early stage worldwide. But interest in the field is growing. According to veteran environmental activist Maya Jacobs, one of Thursday’s conference organizers, more than 20 Israeli companies are involved in different aspects of carbon sequestration at this time.
At the conference, entrepreneurs presented projects ranging from deep-sea cultivation of seaweed, which captures carbon dioxide for photosynthesis, to conversion of organic waste into biochar, a kind of nutrient-rich light coal that can help nourish soils.
Arumugam said he saw particular global potential in two of the projects described: Israeli drip irrigation company Netafim’s water- and methane-saving system for irrigating rice, and Albo Climate’s system for analyzing satellite imagery using deep learning to map, measure and monitor carbon sequestration.
“Currently, monitoring has to be physical,” he explained to The Times of Israel. “You need to take a sample (for example, of soil), go to a lab and it costs a huge amount of money in terms of the transaction cost. If newly available imaging tech can bring down costs, it will pave the way for people to use carbon markets on a larger scale and that’s where I believe you [Israel] can be a one-stop-shop solution for monitoring carbon emissions worldwide.”
The Foreign Ministry’s climate envoy, Gideon Behar, said the conference was aimed at kickstarting a carbon sequestration community in Israel, which would help the authorities to understand the great need and huge opportunities in the field.
Carbon trading and offsetting is not an alternative to cutting emissions. Rather, it helps cap the total amount of carbon that can enter the atmosphere and turns it into a commodity worth money. It does this by enabling companies — and countries — that are unable to completely eliminate their…
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