Using Highway Medians for Carbon Sequestration

Americans are thinking about undeveloped land alongside and between roadways as a low cost and widely dispersed strategy for carbon sequestration

1 minute read

April 15, 2016, 11:00 AM PDT

By urbanguy


John McReynolds writes:

Researchers from the Western Transportation Institute (WTI) at Montana State University report that roadside soils and vegetation on federal lands alone are already capturing almost two percent of total U.S. transportation carbon emissions. WTI adds that the land alongside America’s four million miles of public roadways already maintained by federal, state and local governments could be planted with vegetation optimized for storing atmospheric carbon dioxide and could serve as valuable “banks” for meeting ambitious carbon sequestration goals set at the recent Paris climate accord.

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