Publication Date:
2022-05-26
Description:
© The Author(s), 2020. This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License. The definitive version was published in Jin, D., Hoagland, P., & Buesseler, K. O. The value of scientific research on the ocean's biological carbon pump. Science of the Total Environment, 749, (2020): 141357, doi:10.1016/j.scitotenv.2020.141357.
Description:
The ocean's biological carbon pump (BCP) sequesters carbon from the surface to the deep ocean and seabed, constituting one of Earth's most valuable ecosystem services. Significant uncertainty exists surrounding the amounts and rates of organic carbon sequestered in the oceans, however. With improved understanding of BCP sequestration, especially its scale, world policymakers would be positioned to make more informed decisions regarding the mitigation of carbon emissions. Here, an analytical model of the economic effects of global carbon emissions—including scientific uncertainty about BCP sequestration—was developed to estimate the value of marine scientific research concerning sequestration. The discounted net economic benefit of a putative 20-year scientific research program to narrow the range of uncertainty around the amount of carbon sequestered in the ocean is on the order of $0.5 trillion (USD), depending upon the accuracy of predictions, the convexities of climate damage and economic output functions, and the initial range of uncertainty.
Description:
This research is supported by WHOI's Ocean Twilight Zone program which is part of the Audacious Project, a collaborative endeavor, housed at TED. DJ was also funded by National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) Cooperative Institutes (CINAR) award NA14OAR4320158. KB was also funded by National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) as part of the EXport Processes in the Ocean from RemoTe Sensing (EXPORTS) program award 80NSSC17K0555. We thank Ankur Shah for research assistance and three anonymous reviewers for their constructive suggestions.
Keywords:
Economic value of scientific research
;
Value of information
;
Biological carbon pump
;
Carbon sequestration
;
Ecosystem service
;
Ocean twilight zone
Repository Name:
Woods Hole Open Access Server
Type:
Article
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