Friday, December 23, 2022
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Users of a new digital platform from nonprofit CTrees will be able to follow the carbon emissions and storage rates in the world’s woods in almost real-time. A group of the top climate scientists and data technologists in the world spent two decades researching and developing this platform. It is being hailed as the first global system to ever determine how much carbon is contained in each and every tree on the planet.
Forests important to mitigate climate change
Trees are extremely effective at storing carbon dioxide, but when forests are damaged, cut down, or burned, they release a significant amount of carbon back into the atmosphere. Recent research has revealed that many forests are on the verge of reaching a tipping point that will jeopardise their capacity to store carbon, with some regions of Southeast Asia and the Amazon already net carbon emitters as a result of various stressors caused by humans.
“Forests are extremely important to mitigate climate change because they absorb a major part of the carbon in the atmosphere annually,” Sassan Saatchi, a senior scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory who collaborated with colleagues in the U.S., Brazil, Denmark and France to develop the platform, told Mongabay.
Due to this significant impact on atmospheric carbon, attempts for climate policy that rely on forests to offset carbon emissions have made forest conservation and restoration important parts of efforts to mitigate climate change. But up until now, there hasn’t been a transparent, consistent method for measuring and tracking forest carbon internationally.
According to Saatchi, the new CTrees platform now bridges this gap. Making better science-based judgements is a “game changer,” according to him, for governments, investors, and organisations all across the world. “The transition to carbon neutrality requires accurate accounting,” he said. “To truly evaluate the benefits of carbon reduction efforts, market and policy actors need a global state-of-the-art system for measuring and monitoring. Until now, this technology hasn’t been available to carbon markets, and only on a limited basis to climate policymakers.”
Tags: carbon, carbon emissions, climate change, CTrees, digital platform, wood, woodworking and manufacturing, woodworking industry, woodworking UK
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