Rethinking Carbon and Climate Change: Ranil Senanayake speaks

In search of planetary triggers that set off the current accelerated climate change, Systems Ecologist Dr Ranil Senanayake goes back five centuries to the time before the Industrial Revolution. He argues that global warming started with the systematic removed most forests of the planet – for timber, ship-building, wars and large scale plantation agriculture.

He makes a clear distinction between fossil carbon – coal and petroleum that captured atmospheric carbon millions of years ago – and biotic carbon found in photosynthetic biomass in trees, corals and algae. Biotic carbon represents the sun’s energy, collected by plants and available to human beings. Yet until now, no value has been placed on living (biotic) carbon; instead, only its products – such as timber, fruits, cereals – are valued.

Recognising and valuing biotic carbon, alongside fossil carbon, would provide an economically viable way to better balance the carbon budget. Dr Senanayake, originator of Analog Forestry concept, wants the value of photosynthesis biomass to become a part of the lexicon of the United Nations climate negotiations.

This interview-based video was produced by TVE Asia Pacific. It is released online under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 license.