Slowly getting there: a review of country experience on estimating emissions and removals from forest degradation.
Till Neeff, Javier G P Gamarra, Andreas Vollrath, Erik Lindquist, Ghislaine Gill, Julian Fox, Jennifer Smith, Karen Dyson, Karis Tenneson, Marieke Sandker, Teopista Nakalema
Author Information
Till Neeff: Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, Viale Delle Terme Di Caracalla, 00153, Rome, RM, Italy. till.neeff@fao.org.
Javier G P Gamarra: Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, Viale Delle Terme Di Caracalla, 00153, Rome, RM, Italy.
Andreas Vollrath: Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, Viale Delle Terme Di Caracalla, 00153, Rome, RM, Italy.
Erik Lindquist: Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, Viale Delle Terme Di Caracalla, 00153, Rome, RM, Italy.
Ghislaine Gill: Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, Viale Delle Terme Di Caracalla, 00153, Rome, RM, Italy.
Julian Fox: Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, Viale Delle Terme Di Caracalla, 00153, Rome, RM, Italy.
Jennifer Smith: United States Forest Service, SilvaCarbon Programme, Washington, DC, USA.
Karen Dyson: Spatial Informatics Group, Natural Assets Laboratory, Pleasanton, CA, USA.
Karis Tenneson: Spatial Informatics Group, Natural Assets Laboratory, Pleasanton, CA, USA.
Marieke Sandker: Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, Viale Delle Terme Di Caracalla, 00153, Rome, RM, Italy.
Teopista Nakalema: Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, Viale Delle Terme Di Caracalla, 00153, Rome, RM, Italy.
Estimating emissions and removals from forest degradation is important, yet challenging, for many countries. This paper reports results from analysis of country reporting (to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change and also to several climate finance initiatives) and key take-aways from a south-south exchange workshop among 17 countries with forest mitigation programmes. During the workshop discussions it became clear that, where forest degradation is a major source of emissions, governments want to include it when reporting on their mitigation efforts. However, challenges to accurately estimating emissions from degradation relate to defining forest degradation and setting the scope for estimating carbon stock changes; to detecting and monitoring degradation using earth observation data; and to estimating associated emissions and removals from field observation results. The paper concludes that recent and ongoing investments into data and analysis methods have helped improve forest degradation estimation, but further methodological work and continued effort will be needed.
