Carbon emissions from tropical forest degradation caused by logging

By T. Pearson, Sandra A. Brown, Felipe Casarim. 2014

155 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The focus of land-use related efforts in developing countries to reduce carbon emissions has been on slowing deforestation, yet international agreements are to reduce emissions from both deforestation and forest degradation (REDD). The second ‘D’ is poorly understood and accounted for a number of technical and policy reasons. Here we introduce a complete accounting method for estimating emission factors from selective timber harvesting, a substantial form of forest degradation in many tropical developing countries. The method accounts separately for emissions from the extracted log, from incidental damage to the surrounding forest, and from logging infrastructure, and emissions are expressed as units of carbon per cubic meter of timber extracted to allow for simple application to timber harvesting statistics. We applied the method in six tropical countries (Belize, Bolivia, Brazil, Guyana, Indonesia, and Republic of Congo), resulting in total emission factors of 0.99−2.33 Mg C m−3. In all cases, emissions were dominated by damage to surrounding vegetation and the infrastructure rather than the logs themselves, and total emissions represented about 3–15% of the biomass carbon stocks of the associated unlogged forests. We then combined the emission factors with country level logging statistics for nine key timber producing countries represented by our study areas to gain an understanding of the order of magnitude of emissions from degradation compared to those recently reported for deforestation in the same countries. For the nine countries included, emissions from logging were on average equivalent to about 12% of those from deforestation. For those nine countries with relatively low emissions from deforestation, emissions from logging were equivalent to half or more of those from deforestation, whereas for those countries with the highest emissions from deforestation, emissions from logging were equivalent to <10% of those from deforestation. Understanding how to account emissions and the magnitude of each emissions source resulting from tropical timber harvesting practices helps identify where there are opportunities to reduce emissions from the second ‘D’ in REDD.

Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, Environmental Engineering, Global and Planetary Change

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/88613c144daf2ceae8dfe31256b69214db7d6106

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Citations in the corpus

Global Sustainable Development Report 2019 (2019, methodology): “754 Box adapted from contribution by David Smith, University of the West Indies and Pradeepa Bholanath, Guyana Forestry Commission 755 Mora et al. (eds), 2012; Pearson et al., 2014; Romijn et al., 2015; Bholanath and Cort, 2015; Pickering et al., 2019 756 Ostrom, Elinor, 2010.”
Aboveground carbon loss in natural and managed tropical forests from 2000 to 2012 (2015, background): “Pearson et al (2014) recently found that in countries with high rates of deforestation such as Indonesia and Brazil, carbon emissions from selective logging account for ∼12% of emissions from deforestation, including losses due to infrastructure.”
Towards Causal Inference for Spatio-Temporal Data: Conflict and Forest Loss in Colombia (2020, background): “Yet, tropical forests continue to be under pressure due to agricultural expansion [Angelsen and Kaimowitz, 1999], mining [Sonter et al., 2017], timber harvest [Pearson et al., 2014] or urban expansion [DeFries et al., 2010].”
An integrated pan‐tropical biomass map using multiple reference datasets (2016, background): “Part of the mismatch was in the range of AGB changes that can be attributes to regrowth (1–13 Mg ha 1 year ) (IPCC, 2003) or low-intensity degradation (14– 100 Mg ha , or 3–15% of total stock) (Asner et al., 2010; Pearson et al., 2014).”