Abstract
BackgroundUnder the United Nations convention on the law of the sea (1982), each participating country maintains exclusive economic and environmental rights within the oceanic region extending 200 nm from its coastline, known as the Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ). Although the ocean within each EEZ has a vast capacity to absorb anthropogenic CO2 and therefore potentially be used as a carbon sink, it is not mentioned within the Kyoto Protocol most likely due to inadequate quantitative estimates. Here, I use two methods to estimate the anthropogenic CO2 storage and uptake for a typically large EEZ (Australia).ResultsDepending on whether the Antarctic territory is included I find that during the 1990s between 30–40% of Australia's fossil-fuel CO2 emissions were absorbed by its own EEZ.ConclusionThis example highlights the potential significance of the EEZ carbon sink for national carbon accounts. However, this 'natural anthropogenic CO2 sink' could be used as a disincentive for certain nations to reduce their anthropogenic CO2 emissions, which would ultimately dampen global efforts to reduce atmospheric CO2 concentrations. Since the oceanic anthropogenic CO2 sink has limited ability to be controlled by human activities, current and future international climate change policies should have an explicit 'EEZ' clause excluding its use within national carbon accounts.
Highlights
Under the United Nations convention on the law of the sea (1982), each participating country maintains exclusive economic and environmental rights within the oceanic region extending 200 nm from its coastline, known as the Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ)
The calculations are described in the methods section a the end of the manuscript. This storage of anthropogenic CO2 within Australia's EEZ does not necessarily imply the flux occurred within the EEZ as the ocean can redistribute CO2 from its uptake region to other locations
The global EEZ represents over a quarter of the surface area of the ocean, which undoubtedly acts as important reservoir for sequestering anthropogenic CO2
Summary
Under the United Nations convention on the law of the sea (1982), each participating country maintains exclusive economic and environmental rights within the oceanic region extending 200 nm from its coastline, known as the Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ). The ocean within each EEZ has a vast capacity to absorb anthropogenic CO2 and potentially be used as a carbon sink, it is not mentioned within the Kyoto Protocol most likely due to inadequate quantitative estimates. The ocean CO2 sink is different to other carbon sinks in that it directly remediates against climate change by sequestering anthropogenic. EEZ representing 27% of the oceans area, the question arises as to how significant could the EEZ CO2 sink be for national carbon accounts. I use Australia as a case study to estimate the EEZ anthropogenic CO2 sink due largely to the detailed accounting information on CO2 emissions from fossil fuels and land-use changes [3] along with its very large oceanic territory. Excluding the Antarctic territorial claim, Australia's EEZ is one of the largest in the world and covers an area 8.2 × 106 km2 [4], which makes it larger than its continental land area (7.7 × 106 km2)
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