CARBONDIOXIDE EMISSIONS DUE TO DEFORESTATION

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CO2 emissions caused by loss of trees, for instance due to logging or wildfires, averaged 8.1 billion tonnes annually over the past 20 years, which is roughly half the CO2 that is removed from the atmosphere by forests. The CO2 released as a result of tree cover loss partially offsets the removal.

Tropical deforestation contributes about 20% of annual global greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, and reducing it will be necessary to avoid dangerous climate change. China and the US are the world’s number one and two emitters, but numbers three and four are Indonesia and Brazil, with ~80% and ~70% of their emissions respectively from deforestation. Slowing or stopping deforestation is a near-term, cost-effective option for significantly reducing global emissions, with extraordinary additional benefits for biological diversity and sustainable development in tropical nations. Carbon market incentives to stop deforestation can also help US companies and consumers control the costs of a national cap-and-trade system to reduce US emissions. Accurately monitoring and measuring emissions from deforestation is necessary to creating effective incentives for tropical countries to control and stop the process. The attached paper by remote sensing scientist Dr. Gregory P. Asner 1 shows that technologies and methods already in use in nearly half of the world’s tropical forests accurately monitor and measure deforestation and forest carbon, and could be implemented globally now. The major obstacles to accurate global measurements of emissions from deforestation are political, institutional and budgetary rather than scientific or technical.

1. Tropical Deforestation and Climate Change

 Clearing and burning tropical forests accounts for about 20% of global annual Greenhouse Gas emissions, about as much as all of the fossil fuels burned in the US every year and more than the world’s transportation sector. China and the US are the world’s number one and two emitters, but numbers three and four are Indonesia and Brazil, with ~80% and ~70% of their emissions respectively from deforestation. Reducing overall emissions from deforestation in tropical nations can help avoid dangerous climate change. Most climate scientists think that greatly reducing or stopping tropical deforestation, while also substantially reducing emissions from developed and major developing countries’ fossil fuels, will be necessary to keep warming under 2° C by the end of the century. Climate scientists increasingly regard the two-degree target as the maximum allowable in order to avoid potentially disastrous climate change. Reducing emissions from deforestation in developing countries may produce emissions allowances or credits in carbon markets under the post-2012 global cap-and-trade system under negotiation in the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) 2 . If tropical countries reduce national deforestation below historical levels, emissions allowances from reduced deforestation could help developed countries and their industries control costs and take steeper reductions targets. Carbon market credit for reduced deforestation could also generate the funds needed to make living forests worth more in the market than dead ones, thus making large-scale, long-term tropical conservation possible. Reducing national-level deforestation below historical rates in high-deforestation tropical counties offers the greatest potential emissions reductions from the forestry sector, although carbon sequestration or avoided deforestation projects may help tropical countries develop the capacity to control national deforestation. Measuring emissions from deforestation accurately is necessary for deforestation emissions reductions to trade in carbon markets, or for any performance-based system to compensate reduced emissions from deforestation. The UNFCCC has called on nations to begin measuring and monitoring deforestation rates so that Reduced Emissions from Deforestation and Degradation 3 – known as REDD– can be included in a global agreement to reduce emissions. This paper discusses the methods and technologies currently available for measuring emissions from deforestation at the global, national and regional (e.g., the Amazon) scales. For further information and additional technical details, see DeFries et al. (2005), Gibbs et al. (2007), and Achard et al. (2008).

2. Measuring Emissions from Tropical Deforestation and Degradation:

 Methods and Technologies Overview Two kinds of measurement are needed to estimate GHG emissions from deforestation: the rate of change in the forest cover (or “deforestation rate”) and the amount of carbon stored in the forest (or “carbon stock”). Forest activities that release GHGs can be divided into two categories. Deforestation is the clear-cutting and often burning of entire forest landscapes. Degradation includes selective logging, thinning, burning and other disturbances that do not completely remove the forest canopy but nonetheless lower the carbon-storing capacity of forested areas. The science community is providing methodologies for monitoring both types of activities and for estimating the carbonstoring capacity of forested areas in order to monitor forest carbon stocks. Technologies and methods for measuring deforestation and forest carbon stocks are either already operational or could be implemented on a large scale now. Forest cover can be measured at the global, national and regional levels using satellite mapping technologies together with information from on-the-ground surveys (or “ground-truthing”.) Large-scale deforestation events can easily be detected by satellite imagery, while smaller-scale events can be detected through high-resolution satellite imagery or airplane observation. Measuring forest degradation eventssuch as selective logging or burning poses a greater challenge, but new methods show that this is also feasible. In support of the UNFCCC REDD effort, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change 4 (IPCC) provided Good Practice Guidelines 5 to support countries in developing carbon assessment systems. Assessment systems can be divided into three “tiers” according to level of accuracy. Tier-I, the most general approach, is based on non-spatial, or non-mapping, estimates of national forest cover and on generic estimates of forest carbon density values (e.g. tons of carbon per hectare). Tier II is more detailed, and uses forest maps and forest carbon inventories that are more accurate than Tier-1 “default” values. Tier-III, the most rigorous approach, is based on very detailed landscape-specific or even species-specific carbon stock estimates with regular, ongoing reassessments. Carbon accounting for REDD will have to be conservative, so that countries cannot claim credit for more carbon and more emissions reductions than they can accurately measure and demonstrate. It is likely that most – though not all – tropical forest nations would initially rely on TierI levels o f accuracy, which would be subject to high levels of uncertainty. Carbon values for crediting should not exceed the lower limit of this range of uncertainty. However, more accurate measurement methods are already available and it is expected that forest nations would upgrade in response to clear policy signals.