The Carbon Sequestration Advisory Committee was created through state legislation under the Wyoming Carbon Storage Law. The work of the committee is authorized for eight years from 2001 until 2009.

The main goals of the committee are:

• To provide the state with scientifically-sound information and advice concerning management practices and economic opportunities to store carbon in Wyoming’s agricultural and forest lands.
• Educate the citizens of Wyoming about carbon sequestration, through conferences, presentations, demonstration sites and published media among other means.

Committee members are appointed by the governor and include people from a wide variety of occupations including agricultural producers, state agency officials, power company executives, federal employees and professors.

What is carbon sequestration?

Carbon sequestration in terrestrial ecosystems can be defined as the net removal of CO2 from the atmosphere into long-lived pools of carbon or the prevention of CO2 emissions from the terrestrial ecosystems into the atmosphere. The pools can be living, aboveground biomass (e.g., trees), products with a long, useful life created from biomass (e.g., lumber), living biomass in soils (e.g., roots and microorganisms), or recalcitrant organic and inorganic carbon in soils and deeper subsurface environments. It is important to emphasize that increasing photosynthetic carbon fixation alone is not enough. This carbon must be fixed into long-lived pools. Otherwise, one may be simply altering the size of fluxes in the carbon cycle, not increasing carbon sequestration.

Enhancing the natural processes that remove CO2 from the atmosphere is thought to be one of the most cost-effective means of reducing atmospheric levels of CO2, and forestation and deforestation abatement efforts are already under way. The ways to increase carbon sequestration depend on the ecosystem type considered for example:

• Forest lands The focus includes below-ground carbon and long-term management and utilization of standing stocks, understory, ground cover, and litter.
• Agricultural lands The focus includes crop lands, grasslands, and range lands, with emphasis on increasing long-lived soil carbon.
• Biomass croplands As a complement to ongoing efforts related to biofuels, the focus is on long-term increases in soil carbon.
• Deserts and degraded lands Restoration of degraded lands offers significant benefits and carbon sequestration potential in both below-and above-ground systems.
• Boreal wetlands and peatlands The focus includes management of soil carbon pools and perhaps limited conversion to forest or grassland vegetation where ecologically acceptable.