The carbon content of the land they surveyed ranged from almost zero carbon near the Pacific coast to 150 metric tons per hectare, or 2.47 acres, deep in the rainforest.
The team found an estimated 0.8 billion metric tons of stored carbon at risk of being released into the atmosphere because of deforestation. But if much of Peru’s lands with the highest carbon-storage potential were protected, they could store up to 3 billion metric tons of carbon nationwide, the team found.
In other words, if more of Peru’s rainforest were left unprotected, nearly a third of the carbon trapped in the trees and plants there would be released into the atmosphere, helping to fuel climate change and preventing future carbon emissions from being stored there.
“This study is the first anywhere in the world to provide a high-resolution, national-scale and geographically explicit accounting of vegetation carbon stocks in the tropics,” Asner told Climate Central. “Doing so allows two critically important steps forward in land use — climate change mitigation and ecological conservation.”
The mapping technique his team used helps researchers discover what parts of the rainforests are most threatened by deforestation and the parts of the forests containing the most carbon — land most in need of protection, at least from a climate change perspective, he said.
The accuracy and resolution of the map are so high that it’s accurate all the way down to individual pieces of property, allowing landowners to compare the carbon content of their land with that of their neighbors.
“This allows all stakeholders, large and small, to come to the table and to finally put forest carbon at the forefront of the effort to slow climate change,” Asner said. “I can’t emphasize enough how important this is to making forest carbon worth something, say, compared to other forms of land use such as surface mining or oil palm, which are major carbon emitters.”
The mapping technique can also be used in other parts of the globe to map carbon storage in other forests, but the remote sensing Lidar equipment would have to be recalibrated for forests outside the tropics, he said.
This article is reproduced with permission from Climate Central. The article was first published on November 11, 2014.
