Climate Change Glossary

Choose Words Carefully

When communicating about climate change, sidestep jargon that may be clear to specialists but not to the general populace. Words like resilience, mitigation, adaptation and sequestration should give way to more accessible terms like readiness, reducing pollution, disaster preparedness and carbon storage.

How to Talk about Climate Change

Land trusts should differentiate themselves from other climate messengers by using plain English.

Climate shoptalk — “resilience,” “carbon sequestration,” etc. — provokes those with conservative views like a red cape provokes a bull. There is no harm using this language in professional circles, but it is counterproductive outside of these circles. Here is a short list  from Water Words that Work of common jargon and possible substitutes that land trusts should consider using in their climate messages. More information on this topic is available from Water Words That Work's report, “How to Talk about Climate Change.”

Climate Change Glossary

A complete glossary is available on the Conservation in a Changing Climate website.

BECCS (bioenergy with carbon capture and storage)

BECCS production of bioenergy using biomass, coupled with the harvesting and subsequent storing of carbon dioxide. This storing of carbon dioxide can be underground, in oceans, or in forests.

Bio sequestration

Terrestrial sequestration (sometimes termed “biological sequestration”) is typically accomplished through forest and soil conservation practices that enhance the storage of carbon (such as restoring and establishing new forests, wetlands, and grasslands) or reduce CO2 emissions (such as reducing agricultural tillage and suppressing wildfires).

Bioenergy

Biomass is defined as living or recently dead organisms and any byproducts of those organisms, plant or animal. The term is generally understood to exclude coal, oil, and other fossilized remnants of organisms, as well as soils. In the context of biomass energy, the term refers to those crops, residues, and other biological materials that can be used as a substitute for fossil fuels in the production of energy

Blue carbon

Blue carbon is the carbon stored in coastal and marine ecosystems. These ecosystems sequester and store large quantities of blue carbon in both the plants and the sediment below.

Blue infrastructure

Blue infrastructure is a term sometimes used to describe the use of proprietary, small footprint, high-efficiency devices installed and retrofitted within existing water collection systems. Blue infrastructure can be used to connect the benefits of green and grey infrastructure, and is especially practical in challenging redevelopment environments such as tightly spaced urban areas.

Brown carbon

Types of brown carbon include tar materials from smoldering fires or coal combustion, breakdown products from biomass burning, a mixture of organic compounds emitted from soil, and volatile organic compounds given off by vegetation. Originates primarily during the combustion of organic biomass and is a close cousin of black carbon.

Carbon capture and storage

Carbon capture and storage (CCS), which is sometimes called carbon capture and sequestration, prevents large amounts of carbon dioxide (CO2) from being released into the atmosphere. The technology involves capturing CO2 produced by large industrial plants, compressing it for transportation and then injecting it deep into a rock formation at a carefully selected and safe site, where it is permanently stored. This process can result in negative emissions.

Cap-and-trade/carbon credits/carbon trading

Cap-and-trade schemes are the most popular way to regulate carbon dioxide (CO2) and other emissions. The scheme's governing body begins by setting a cap on allowable emissions. It then distributes or auctions off emissions allowances that total the cap. Member firms that do not have enough allowances to cover their emissions must either make reductions or buy another firm's spare credits. Members with extra allowances can sell them or bank them for future use. Cap-and-trade schemes can be either mandatory or voluntary.

In step with the dramatic rise in C02 emissions and other pollutants in recent years, a variety of new financial markets have emerged, offering businesses key incentives — aside from taxes and other punitive measures — to slow down overall emissions growth and, ideally, global warming itself.

A key feature of these markets is emissions trading, or cap-and-trade schemes, which allow companies to buy or sell "credits" that collectively bind all participating companies to an overall emissions limit.

Under a basic cap-and-trade scheme, if a company’s carbon emissions fall below a set allowance, that company can sell the difference — in the form of credits — to other companies that exceed their limits.

Carbon offsets

In this global market, a set of middlemen companies, called offset firms, estimate a company’s emissions and then act as brokers by offering opportunities to invest in carbon-reducing projects around the world. Unlike carbon trading, offsetting isn’t yet government regulated in most countries; it’s up to buyers to verify a project’s environmental worth.

Carbon cycle

The carbon cycle is the process through which carbon is cycled through the air, ground, plants, animals, and fossil fuels.

Carbon drawdown

The point at which greenhouse gas levels begin to decline.

Clean Development Mechanism

Organized by the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) allows emission-reduction projects in developing countries to earn certified emission reduction (CER) credits, each equivalent to one tonne of CO2. These CERs can be traded and sold, and used by industrialized countries to a meet a part of their emission reduction targets under the Kyoto Protocol.

The mechanism stimulates sustainable development and emission reductions, while giving industrialized countries some flexibility in how they meet their emission reduction limitation targets.

Coral bleaching

When corals are stressed by changes in conditions such as temperature, light, or nutrients, they expel the symbiotic algae living in their tissues, causing them to turn completely white. When a coral bleaches, it is not dead. Corals can survive a bleaching event, but they are under more stress and are subject to mortality.

Warmer water temperatures can result in coral bleaching, but not all bleaching events are caused by this.

Green carbon

Green carbon is the carbon that is stored in terrestrial ecosystems such as forests, pastures and soils. This carbon can be released into the atmosphere through deforestation and fire.

Green infrastructure

Green infrastructure is the “strategic use of networks of natural lands, working landscapes, and other open spaces to conserve ecosystem values and functions and provide associated benefits to human populations

Grey infrastructure

Grey infrastructure refers to the human-engineered infrastructure for water resources such as water and wastewater treatment plants, pipelines, and reservoirs. Grey infrastructure typically refers to components of a centralized approach to water management.

Habitat connectivity

Many species of plants and animals rely on connected patches of habitat to move around their territories, find mates, hunt, forage and reproduce. Moving between significant patches of habitat is critical for maintaining healthy populations of organisms.

Invasive species

An invasive species can be any kind of living organism — an amphibian (like the cane toad), plant, insect, fish, fungus, bacteria, or even an organism’s seeds or eggs — that is not native to an ecosystem and causes harm. They can harm the environment, the economy, or even human health. Species that grow and reproduce quickly, and spread aggressively, with potential to cause harm, are given the label “invasive.”

Kyoto Protocol

The Kyoto Protocol is an international agreement linked to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, which commits its Parties by setting internationally binding emission reduction targets.

During the second commitment period, Parties committed to reduce GHG emissions by at least 18 percent below 1990 levels in the eight-year period from 2013 to 2020.

LULUCF (Land Use, Land Use Change and Forestry)

Under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change any process, activity or mechanism which removes a greenhouse gas from the atmosphere is referred to as a "sink". Human activities impact terrestrial sinks, through land use, land-use change and forestry (LULUCF) activities, consequently, the exchange of CO2 (carbon cycle) between the terrestrial biosphere system and the atmosphere is altered.

The role of LULUCF activities in the mitigation of climate change has long been recognized. Mitigation can be achieved through activities in the LULUCF sector that increase the removals of greenhouse gases (GHGs) from the atmosphere or decrease emissions by sources leading to an accumulation of carbon stocks.

Forests present a significant global carbon stock accumulated through growth of trees and an increase in soil carbon.

Ocean acidification

The ocean absorbs about 30% of the CO2 that is released in the atmosphere, and as levels of atmospheric CO2 increase, so do the levels in the ocean. When CO2 is absorbed by seawater, a series of chemical reactions occur resulting in the increased concentration of hydrogen ions. This increase causes the seawater to become more acidic and causes carbonate ions to be relatively less abundant.

Decreases in carbonate ions can make building and maintaining shells and other calcium carbonate structures difficult for calcifying organisms such as oysters, clams, sea urchins, shallow water corals, deep sea corals and calcareous plankton.

The Paris Agreement

The Paris Agreement central aim is to strengthen the global response to the threat of climate change by keeping a global temperature rise this century well below 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels.

Additionally, the agreement aims to strengthen the ability of countries to deal with the impacts of climate change.

REDD

The United Nations Collaborative Programme on Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation in Developing Countries was launched in 2008 (see factsheet).

Parties to the UNFCCC have developed a climate change mitigation approach designed to incentivize developing countries to reduce carbon emissions from deforestation and forest degradation.

This mitigation approach is known as REDD+ and is defined as “reducing emissions from deforestation and forest degradation in developing countries, and the role of conservation, sustainable management of forests and enhancement of forest carbon stocks”.

Sea level rise

Sea level rise is caused primarily by two factors related to global warming: the added water from melting ice sheets and glaciers and the expansion of seawater as it warms.

Higher sea levels mean that deadly and destructive storm surges push farther inland than they once did, which also means more frequent nuisance flooding.