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Baseline Map of Carbon Emissions from Deforestation in Tropical Regions
Tropical Carbon Loss
Accurate and precise measures of tropical deforestation and the resulting carbon emissions are needed in order to formulate climate policy. Harris et al. (p. 1573; see the Perspective by Zarin) used satellite observations of deforestation within the tropics of three continents to estimate that gross annual carbon emissions were approximately 0.8 Pg Cyr−2 (Pg = 1015 g) for the years 2000 to 2005, from the loss of 43 million hectares of forest. This result, which is about one-third of some previous estimates, should serve as a baseline for future assessments of changes in the rate of loss of tropical forests.
Abstract
Policies to reduce emissions from deforestation would benefit from clearly derived, spatially explicit, statistically bounded estimates of carbon emissions. Existing efforts derive carbon impacts of land-use change using broad assumptions, unreliable data, or both. We improve on this approach using satellite observations of gross forest cover loss and a map of forest carbon stocks to estimate gross carbon emissions across tropical regions between 2000 and 2005 as 0.81 petagram of carbon per year, with a 90% prediction interval of 0.57 to 1.22 petagrams of carbon per year. This estimate is 25 to 50% of recently published estimates. By systematically matching areas of forest loss with their carbon stocks before clearing, these results serve as a more accurate benchmark for monitoring global progress on reducing emissions from deforestation.
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References and Notes
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Published In
Science
Volume 336 | Issue 6088
22 June 2012
22 June 2012
Copyright
Copyright © 2012, American Association for the Advancement of Science.
Submission history
Received: 15 December 2011
Accepted: 3 May 2012
Published in print: 22 June 2012
Acknowledgments
Funding for this work was provided to Winrock International under contract 7150484 by the World Bank’s World Development Report 2010: Development and Climate Change. The findings, interpretations, and conclusions expressed in this paper are entirely those of the authors. They do not necessarily represent the views of the World Bank and its affiliated organizations or those of the Executive Directors of the World Bank or the governments they represent. Support for the forest cover loss mapping work was provided by National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s Land Cover and Land Use Change and MEASURES programs under grants NNG06GD95G and NNX08AP33A. The authors would like to thank K. Mokany for providing the original data used to derive relationships between above- and belowground biomass. Forest loss data are available at http://globalmonitoring.sdstate.edu/projects/gfm. Carbon stock data are available at http://carbon.jpl.nasa.gov. Emissions data are available at www.appliedgeosolutions.com/science-paper.html.
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