Harris, Nancy L.;
Brown, Sandra;
Hagen, Stephen C.;
Saatchi, Sassan S.;
Petrova, Silvia;
Salas, William;
Hansen, Matthew C.;
Potapov, Peter V.;
Lotsch, Alexander
Baseline Map of Carbon Emissions from Deforestation in Tropical Regions
You can manage bookmarks using lists, please log in to your user account for this.
Media type:
E-Article
Title:
Baseline Map of Carbon Emissions from Deforestation in Tropical Regions
Contributor:
Harris, Nancy L.;
Brown, Sandra;
Hagen, Stephen C.;
Saatchi, Sassan S.;
Petrova, Silvia;
Salas, William;
Hansen, Matthew C.;
Potapov, Peter V.;
Lotsch, Alexander
Published:
American Association for the Advancement of Science, 2012
Published in:
Science, 336 (2012) 6088, Seite 1573-1576
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.