Publication Date:
2012-06-23
Description:
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.〈br /〉〈span class="detail_caption"〉Notes: 〈/span〉Harris, Nancy L -- Brown, Sandra -- Hagen, Stephen C -- Saatchi, Sassan S -- Petrova, Silvia -- Salas, William -- Hansen, Matthew C -- Potapov, Peter V -- Lotsch, Alexander -- New York, N.Y. -- Science. 2012 Jun 22;336(6088):1573-6. doi: 10.1126/science.1217962.〈br /〉〈span class="detail_caption"〉Author address: 〈/span〉Ecosystem Services Unit, Winrock International, Arlington, VA 22202, USA. nharris@winrock.org〈br /〉〈span class="detail_caption"〉Record origin:〈/span〉 〈a href="http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22723420" target="_blank"〉PubMed〈/a〉
Keywords:
Africa South of the Sahara
;
Asia
;
Biomass
;
*Carbon
;
*Conservation of Natural Resources
;
Developing Countries
;
*Ecosystem
;
Latin America
;
Monte Carlo Method
;
Remote Sensing Technology
;
Soil
;
*Trees
;
*Tropical Climate
Print ISSN:
0036-8075
Electronic ISSN:
1095-9203
Topics:
Biology
,
Chemistry and Pharmacology
,
Computer Science
,
Medicine
,
Natural Sciences in General
,
Physics
