If someone asks you to think about technology’s contribution to sustainability, most people latch on to the ‘flashy’ solutions – those that replace physical travel; seamlessly integrate public transport to make it usable and attractive; and other such things.

But what is often overlooked is the already well-established, but arguably duller, role of ICT in Environmental Information Processing – the data collation, analysis and management systems that we use to drive sustainability progress in our organisations, or which were needed to ‘find’ global warming by amalgamating complex data from thousands of dispersed weather stations.

I was fortunate enough to spend a number of years stomping about in Tanzanian rainforests hugging trees to measure their size and growth rates. At the time, I was assessing the environmental impact of diverting a river through the turbines of a major hydropower project, and had no thought for how the data I was collecting could be used elsewhere.

However, a paper published today in Nature (Increasing carbon storage in intact African tropical forests) has used the power of ICT to analyse my data, alongside that of 32 other scientists, to partially clear up the problem of the missing carbon sink.

We know that not all of the carbon dioxide emitted into the Earth’s atmosphere remains there, but what we were less clear on, is where the missing 17 billion tonnes actually goes. We knew that about half is taken up by the oceans, but that still left about eight billion mislaid tonnes...until now.

Now, it may seem a little obvious to say that we’ve found that rainforest trees have been getting bigger – a bit like announcing the discovery that alcohol gets you drunk – but this is, in fact, a big deal.

Previously, it was assumed that rainforest was essentially in a stable equilibrium – that the type and amount of biomass in an area of forest remained roughly constant over time, with new stem growth replacing tree death. What our combined data shows instead is that over the last few decades rainforest trees have been storing more carbon in their trunks than expected, and that each hectare of undisturbed African rainforest has been storing an additional 0.6 tonnes of carbon per year (equivalent to about two tonnes of atmospheric CO2).

In total, we estimate that tropical forests remove a massive 4.8 billion tonnes of CO2 emissions from the atmosphere each year of which 1.2 billion tonnes are mopped-up in this previously unknown African carbon sink.

These trees are giving us a free subsidy – absorbing 18% of the CO2 we add to the atmosphere and buffering us a little against the onslaught of climate change, but it is clearly not going to last forever.

Trees will not continue to get bigger in perpetuity, and indeed their very existence is continually threatened by ‘development’ and the inability (to date) of the global community to be able to assign a greater financial value to them standing rather than clear cut.

That may be about to change with the REDD (Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and forest Degradation) negotiations at the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change in Copenhagen at the end of this year. The hope is that, finally, the global carbon community will recognise that haggling over the precise volume of carbon sequestered by trees over their lifetime, or nitpicking about the qualifying criteria for a forest-protection scheme is doing nothing but hastening the time at which such considerations become immaterial.

It is an unequivocal fact that living trees absorb carbon, and dead trees don’t. It is also, therefore, undisputed that there is no way we’ll be able to achieve our 2050 CO2 stabilisation targets without the sequestration help of our remaining forests. This latest work adds yet more weight to the argument of forest protection and investment, by proving that their importance as a carbon sink is greater than we realised. We hope that the REDD deliberations will listen to us.

And so back to the original question – if you were to be asked about technology’s contribution to sustainability, what would your answer be now?

Image: Eky Chan 

A corner of rural South East England might seem an odd place to look for a turning point in the fight against climate change. But Kingsnorth in Kent is being hailed as just the spot, after protests at a power station operated by E.ON landed a group of Greenpeace campaigners in court. On trial was their right to protest at proposals for a new coal burning power station, set to generate CO2 emissions equivalent to those of the thirty smallest countries in the world (according to Greenpeace).

Interesting in itself, but it’s the subtext of the trial – that climate change warrants this kind of protest, that the UK Government still lacks any real purpose on climate change, and that carbon capture and storage technology is still in the realm of wishful thinking – that is now fascinating commentators. One jury, at least, has concluded that the potential damage climate change will bring constitutes a ‘lawful excuse’ for a protest aiming to protect property of greater value (ie the planet) from the impact of climate change by causing £35,000 worth of damage to a chimney belching out CO2.

This is obviously rather annoying for climate change deniers, with blogger Melanie Phillips wondering if the world’s gone mad and deciding that a jury could only possibly have reached such a conclusion by being subjected to “a propaganda barrage by militant manmade global warming fanatics”

Perhaps less predictable is how the Government and E.ON will respond. The new station they want to build to replace Kingsnorth was to be a far more efficient facility than the present one – by about 20% - and would power 1.5 million homes, an important contribution to filling the hole in energy supply coming at us in the next 20 years. The hope for coal is that carbon capture and storage technology will come on stream in the next few years to mitigate its emissions, but Kingsnorth 2 was not set to use CCS, and EON itself acknowledged to BERR as recently as January that CCS technology "obviously... has no current reference for viability at any scale".

In an ironic twist, the verdict on Kingsnorth eclipsed a more minor news story of the same day – the opening of the world's first CCS plant in Spremberg in Germany. Though the UK government is keen to see CCS technology developed in the UK, and E.ON has been researching Oxyfuel CCS at their Nottinghamshire base for the last 18 months, both have admitted that they have fallen behind Vattenfall, the Swedish company behind the German plant. For fans of innovation as a route to sustainability, falling behind in the race for CCS can't be good news for us or the planet.

So, is this the beginning of the end for fossil fuel power generation? The Guardian is holding a vote on whether climate change constitutes a valid defence for this protest. With the vote closing tomorrow, it’s neck and neck with those believing the protesters were right narrowly ahead at 53% of the vote as I write.

It seems unlikely that E.ON will be able to go ahead with Kingsnorth without CCS, adding an estimated £500 million to construction costs, but what's more worrying for advocates of new coal is a growing sense that sceptics in the cabinet - Miliband and Benn particularly - may be gaining the upper hand. And as veteran environmentalist Lester Brown claimed in a recent Green Futures article, investors are already deserting new coal in the US - even with CCS factored in, on simple economic grounds. With both Conservatives and Lib Dems also opposed to new coal generation, its few remaining advocates outside industry - stand up John Hutton and Arthur Scargill - suddenly seem to have a mountain to climb if they are to convince us all.