Carbon Sequestration as an Effective Tool to Combat Climate Change

Abstract

Anthropogenic activities like deforestation, industrialization has led to serious deterioration in environmental quality resulting in global climate change. Delhi being the National Capital Territory of India, contributes a lot in terms of atmospheric pollution emitted from various sources. Climate change is an issue of global concern. IPCC have predicted the increase in Earth’s temperature by 1.5˚C in coming 5 years. Carbon being the main reason behind all the climatic issues, can be naturally sequestrated by plants. Many studies have revealed that many tree species are capable of storing large amount of atmospheric carbon through photosynthesis, and the amount of carbon stored is majorly depends on the biomass of the plant. With an increase in natural disasters and problems associated with climate change, it is very important to find a solution to combat climate change. Trees and shrubs being the largest terrestrial carbon sink can help in mitigating global climate change. This paper compared the total carbon stored by 3242 trees belonging to 25 different species taken from three different regions of Delhi - NCR and 1510 shrubs belonging to 8 different species taken from an urban setup of Sarguja, Chhattisgarh, and providing an alternative and feasible prospective to effectively increase carbon sequestration in urban areas by adopting vertical gardening method.