Abstract: Biologically rich tropical forests provide us with various goods and services while including regulation of global and local climates. Fast-growing human populations coupled with inappropriate forest management have resulted in the losses over the past decades of about 13 million hectares of tropical forests; an even larger area degraded due to overexploitation including illegal and pre-mature re-entry logging. All this deforestation and forest degradation resulted in the emissions of 2.9 billion tonnes of carbon emissions during 1990-2007, or about 36% of total global emissions. At the 15th Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) in December 2009, world leaders adopted the Copenhagen Accord to recognize many critical issues regarding global climate change and how to address its impacts. The Accord recognizes the importance of reducing carbon emissions from deforestation and forest degradation as well as of conserving and enhancing forest carbon stocks or the REDD+. The REDD+ scheme that emerged from Copenhagen is designed to provide financial compensation for forest activities that result in verified carbon emission reductions or removals of carbon from the atmosphere. However, how such emission reductions and/or removals are accounted is still debatable.
This lecture will discuss some methods being used to estimate carbon emissions and the reduced emissions and removals from deforestation and forest degradation and from sustainable management of forests. Some existing carbon verification schemes will also be discussed.
About the speaker: Dr Nophea K. Sasaki is an Associate Professor in Environmental Policy at the University of Hyogo in Kobe, Japan. He has specialization in tropical forest management and the REDD+ scheme, and forest carbon stocks modeling. He serves as research advisor to one research institute and a private low-carbon solution company in Japan. After obtaining his PhD in Japan in 2002, he pursued his postdoc on forestry carbon cycling modeling and climate policy at the Max Planck Institute for Biogeochemistry/Meteorology in Germany for two years. He was a Bullard Fellow at Harvard University where he conducted research exclusively on REDD+ scheme. He has published many outstanding publications in international journals, and his work was also covered by Nature in 2009.
More details are available at this link: http://www.ai.u-hyogo.ac.jp/~nophea/