ENECO2: An initiative to identify natural decarbonization pathways in Argentina

LÓPEZ ABBATE, M.C.; ARBILLA, L.A.; GILABERT, AZUL; DELGADO, A. L.; MARTÍNEZ, A.; GARZÓN CARDONA, J.E.; OSIROFF, A.P.; KAHL, L.C.; PIOLA, A.

Seattle

Conferencia; PICES-2023 Annual Meeting: Connecting Science and Communities for Sustainable Seas; 2023

PICES-North Pacific Marine Science Organization

The recent measurement of urban emissions of CO2 from cities in Argentina revealed that Bahía Blanca is the coastal city with the highest per capita emissions nationwide. This is due to its intense industrial activity relative to the small population; in fact, the port of Bahía Blanca houses the largest petrochemical industrial hub in the country and the fifth in South America. The recently launched ENECO2 (Negative Emissions of CO2) project seeks to estimate the natural decarbonization potential of the nearby estuary (Fig. 1) and whether this may contribute to the compensation of the high city greenhouse gas emissions. On the other hand, the open ocean stores around 30% of the CO2 of anthropogenic origin emitted into the atmosphere, in contrast, the role of oceanic continental margins in the global carbon cycle has been the subject of controversy. This uncertainty derives from the heterogeneity of the land-ocean continuum, and the wide spatio-temporal variability of air-water CO2 flux (FCO2) in future scenarios of climate change. One way to reduce this uncertainty is to regionalize FCO2 within the coastal domain and identify patterns that can be extrapolated to the ecosystem level.