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posted by janrinok on Monday November 04 2019, @08:08AM   Printer-friendly
from the wooden-you-just-know-it... dept.

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

A new study in the journal Science Advances says that carbon impacts from the loss of intact tropical forests has been grossly underreported.

The study calculates new figures relating to intact tropical forest lost between 2000-2013 that show a staggering increase of 626 percent in the long-term net carbon impacts through 2050. The revised total equals two years' worth of all global land-use change emissions.

The authors of the study, from WCS, University of Queensland, University of Oxford, Zoological Society of London, World Resources Institute, University of Maryland, and University of Northern British Columbia, found that direct clearance of intact tropical forests resulted in just 3.2 percent of gross carbon emissions from all deforestation across the pan-tropics. However, when they factored in full carbon accounting, which considers forgone carbon removals (carbon sequestration that would occur annually into the future if cleared or degraded forest had remained intact after year 2000), selective logging, edge effects and declines of carbon-dense tree species due to overhunting of seed-dispersing animals, they discovered that the figure skyrocketed by a factor of more than six times.

Said the study's lead author Sean Maxwell of WCS and the University of Queensland: "Our results revealed that continued destruction of intact tropical forests is a ticking time bomb for carbon emissions. There is an urgent need to safeguard these landscapes because they play an indispensable role in stabilizing the climate."

According to 2013 estimates, 549 million acres of intact tropical forests remain. Only 20 percent of tropical forests can be considered "intact," but those areas store some 40 percent of the above-ground carbon found in all tropical forests.

The authors say that intact forest retention rarely attracts funding from schemes designed to avoid land-use and land cover change emissions in developing nations.

Notably, the Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation (REDD+) approach enables developing countries to receive financial incentives for enhancing carbon stocks, or avoiding the loss of carbon that would otherwise be emitted due to land-use and land cover change. Among other activities, REDD+ covers support for conservation of forests not under immediate threat, and was formally adopted by parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change in 2008 at the 14th Conference of the Parties in Poland. Since then, however, financial support and implementation has predominantly focused on areas with high historical rates of deforestation (i.e. 'deforestation frontiers'). This is widely believed to deliver more immediate and more clearly demonstrable emission reductions than conserving intact forest areas. The latter tend to be treated as negligible sources of emissions as a result of the short timescales and conservative assumptions under which REDD+ operates -- assumptions which the present study suggests are causing key opportunities to be missed.

Journal Reference:

Sean L. Maxwell, Tom Evans, James E. M. Watson, Alexandra Morel, Hedley Grantham, Adam Duncan, Nancy Harris, Peter Potapov, Rebecca K. Runting, Oscar Venter, Stephanie Wang, Yadvinder Malhi. Degradation and forgone removals increase the carbon impact of intact forest loss by 626%. Science Advances, 2019; 5 (10): eaax2546 DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.aax2546


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  • (Score: 2) by HiThere on Monday November 04 2019, @05:09PM

    by HiThere (866) Subscriber Badge on Monday November 04 2019, @05:09PM (#915775) Journal

    Not really. The water vapor is only a temporary resident in the atmosphere, and is, anyway, in balance with evaporation from the sea surface*. CO2 is a long time resident.

    * In case it's not obvious, the argument is that the more humid the air is, the less it will accept evaporation at any given temperature.

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