Journal
SCIENCE
Volume 336, Issue 6088, Pages 1573-1576Publisher
AMER ASSOC ADVANCEMENT SCIENCE
DOI: 10.1126/science.1217962
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Funding
- Winrock International under World Bank [7150484]
- National Aeronautics and Space Administration [NNG06GD95G, NNX08AP33A]
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Policies to reduce emissions from deforestation would benefit from clearly derived, spatially explicit, statistically bounded estimates of carbon emissions. Existing efforts derive carbon impacts of land-use change using broad assumptions, unreliable data, or both. We improve on this approach using satellite observations of gross forest cover loss and a map of forest carbon stocks to estimate gross carbon emissions across tropical regions between 2000 and 2005 as 0.81 petagram of carbon per year, with a 90% prediction interval of 0.57 to 1.22 petagrams of carbon per year. This estimate is 25 to 50% of recently published estimates. By systematically matching areas of forest loss with their carbon stocks before clearing, these results serve as a more accurate benchmark for monitoring global progress on reducing emissions from deforestation.
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