New study confirms protected forests preserve equivalent to one year of global fossil fuel emissions through avoided emissions.
New study confirms protected forests preserve equivalent to one year of global fossil fuel emissions through avoided emissions.
A study recently published in Nature Communications by researchers at the University of Maryland (UMD), Northern Arizona University, University of Arizona, Conservation International and more has found that worldwide protected forests have an additional 9.65 billion metric tons of carbon stored in their aboveground biomass compared to ecologically similar unprotected areas—a finding that quantifies just how important protected areas are in our continued climate mitigation efforts.
This study, which was jointly funded by the National Science Foundation (PI Brian Enquist, University of Arizona) and NASA (PI Laura Duncanson, UMD), used the highly accurate forest height, structure and surface elevation data produced by NASA's Global Ecosystem Dynamics Investigation (GEDI, PI Ralph Dubayah, UMD). The team of researchers compared protected areas’ efficacy in avoiding emissions to the atmosphere with unprotected areas’ ability to do the same and tested the assumption that protected areas provide disproportionately more ecosystem services—including carbon storage and sequestration—than non-protected areas.
"We have never had these 3D satellite datasets before, so we have never been able to map forest carbon accurately at this scale. Analyzing the data to discover the magnitude of avoided emissions in protected areas shines yet another light on the global importance of forest conservation,” said UMD Assistant Professor Laura Duncanson, lead author of the study. “We look forward to continuing this work to monitor the future success of protected areas for preserving carbon.”
Read more at University of Maryland
Photo Credit: Polifoto via Pixabay
