High-Speed Monitoring Data Identifies Carbon-Loss Hotspots in African Forests
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One of the most effective ways to mitigate climate change and protect essential ecosystem services is to preserve and reduce rainforest loss. Rapid monitoring of temporal and spatial data is required to identify the right hotspots for proper monitoring of collaborative advances toward forest-specific emissions reduction goals and more transparent reporting of carbon losses. A recent study has revealed the feasibility of using Earth observation data to trigger carbon loss alerts for Africa's rainforests at a much faster rate and in much greater spatial detail than before.
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Countries are required to present their plans to address the
climate crisis under the Paris Agreement, including efforts to reduce emissions
caused by deforestation and forest degradation. However, to track progress,
the amount of carbon stored in forests must be accurately quantified in a
timely manner. Tracking forest carbon in Africa's humid rainforests is
hampered by the time lag in updating national forest inventories, which in some
countries can be several years old and unsuitable for driving mitigation
action.
In a new study published in Nature Communications, the researchers from Wageningen University and the Research Laboratory of Geo-Information Science and Remote Sensing combined
near-real-time forest disturbance alerts from all-weather radar data with
aboveground carbon stocks to
provide high spatial and temporal resolution carbon loss estimates for Africa's
rainforests.
"We used this method to identify hotspots of when and
where carbon loss occurs throughout the year," says Dr.Johannes Reiche, Associate Professor, and Researcher at Wageningen University.
We investigated this in 23 countries between 2019 and 2020. For example, we
discovered that the Central African Republic lost 75% of its total annual
carbon loss in the first three months of 2020, while Madagascar lost 89% in the
final five months of the same year.
Carbon loss across Africa’s rainforests. Credit: Csillik et al. (2022)
Researchers also discovered a noticeable dry-wet seasonal variation in carbon loss per year in countries such as Cameroon, Liberia, Nigeria, the Central African Republic, and Madagascar. The Republic of the Congo and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, on the other hand, experienced two dry-wet season differences each year with different intensities due to their latitudinal level.
"This seasonal
variation can be explained by increased access to forests during the dry months.
Smallholder agriculture and logging activities are then more feasible than
during the wet season when several routes are becoming unreachable." Reiche
said.
“The approach can provide
a benchmarking approach that will enhance countries’ capacities to track their
progress towards the goals of the Glasgow Declaration, as well as the Paris
Agreement,” Reiche added.
The research team intends
to broaden the carbon alerts to include all tropical forests around the world.
“We’ve had interest from some countries for carbon reporting and are working to make the data products available through an interactive web-mapping application”, says Dr. Csillik.
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