1 Climate change: an introduction

Climate change refers to a shift in the long-established average weather conditions.

The long-term shift in climate is mainly attributed to global warming, a result of increased emissions of greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide (CO₂) from burning fossil fuel, or methane (CH₄) from intensive animal farming. These emissions cause changes in the atmosphere, resulting in solar energy being trapped.

The shift in climate has serious implications both for living things directly, such as plants dying in droughts, and for their habitats (living space) indirectly, such as woodland being flattened by high winds.

Floodplain meadows also face these challenges. However, they also show particular resilience to droughts and flooding. Moreover, they may enable humans and other species to cope with a changing climate through both mitigation and adaptation.

Climate change mitigation is any action that moderates the rise in mean global temperature. The goal of mitigation is to make the effects of climate change less severe.

Climate change adaptation is the process of adjusting actions to cope with climate change. It involves reducing the damage caused by climate change, preparing for that change, building resilience and taking advantage of any opportunities that arise.

The next two sections illustrate mitigation (Section 2) and adaptation (Section 3).

The Floodplain Meadows Partnership have worked with the Berkshire, Buckinghamshire and Oxfordshire Wildlife Trust and Long Mead Thames Valley Floodplain Meadow Restoration Project, on a project funded by Ecover, to discover how much carbon is stored in different floodplain land uses, including floodplain meadows. Watch the following video to find out more.

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Transcript: Video 1 Meadows and climate change

CLARE LAWSON

So the Floodplain Meadows Partnership had already sampled lots of ancient meadows, and we’ve collected soil from these and analysed them for soil carbon. And what we knew was that these species-rich floodplain meadows held a lot of carbon within their soils. What we didn’t know was how this compared to arable fields, restored meadows also within the floodplain. So we wanted to make a comparison between these different land uses. Within the soils that we collected, the arable soils had half the amount of carbon within them compared to the ancient meadows. What is shown from this is that how important the well-structured soils of these ancient meadows are in storing carbon. The ancient species-rich meadows hold about 200 tonnes of carbon within that top 50 centimetres. So it’s a huge amount.

DEBBIE LEWIS

The arable fields where we were doing the collection from had a very poor structure. So they were very crumbly, almost sand-like, and they fell to pieces. And because that structure was so poor, there were limited number of animals within there because there was no oxygen essentially for them to breathe.

End transcript: Video 1 Meadows and climate change

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Video 1 Meadows and climate change