Methodological Issues in Forestry Mitigation Projects

1. Methodological Issues in Forestry Mitigation Projects Indu K Murthy Centre for Ecological Sciences Indian Institute of Science Bangalore, India

2. Issues • Climate mitigation through forest sector is a contentious issue • Technical, social and political • Uncertainty associated with GHG emission estimates of biological systems high • The uncertainty of estimates of carbon emissions is high in the LUCF sector • Problems of definitions • Biophysical variations that lead to varied estimates • Limitations of methods or availability of multitude of methods to choose from • Limitations of data • Accounting issues

3. Inventory Techniques • Scientific methods available for estimating C-stock changes in all pools • Aboveground biomass • Robust field ecological methods available for making estimates of aboveground biomass • Plot method adopted  • Soil carbon • Reliable and feasible methods available • Variation due to biophysical factors • Difficult to detect small changes over short periods • Below ground biomass and woody litter • Limited methods available • Very little experience w.r.t to BGB

4. Growth rate of C-pools • Serious limitations w.r.t availability of data on growth rates of different C-pools and forestry activities • Growth rates available only for certain commercially or economically important forestry species • Data for non-commercial forest and horticultural plantation species, naturally regenerating forests and agro-forestry species lacking • No database available for BGB & WL • Biomass estimation equations restricted to commercially important forest species

5. Baseline Development • Knowledge of historical series of conventional practices in the project area, local socio-economic situation, economic trends that may affect the carbon benefits of a project, and other policy relevant parameters required • Determining land-use/land-cover change critical to accurately estimating carbon benefits • Sound methods necessary in order to state within a level of confidence, how well land-use/land-cover change is predicted. • Updated revenue records not available to analyze current land use • In many places, revenue records do not tally with ground reality

6. Additionality & Leakage • Additionality: Not an issue • Records available for understanding trends in A&R • Plan documents available for projecting future rates of A&R • Leakage: Not an issue • If in semi-arid zones • When wastelands with no or insignificant biomass being considered as potential land categories for project implementation • with low or insignificant biomass • current dependence of communities low and could be estimated and incorporated into project design

7. Needs • Need to develop biomass estimation equations for various species commonly opted by communities and farmers • Develop default values for different species across different ecological zones • Rate of change of soil carbon density under different situations – forests, plantation, natural regeneration and agro-forestry situations • Urgent requirement to enable cost-effective and successful development of forestry mitigation projects