They came to learn advanced satellite imaging techniques, and left at the end of September with maps that will help their countries manage their forests and take part in a potential global carbon credit trading system.

The pan-(bio)mass challenge

The WHRC is leading an effort to create the first pan-tropical biomass map that will demonstrate the future effects of deforestation and land use change across the globe. This information is key in developing the Reduced Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation (REDD) policy initiative being negotiated under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC).

Mukund Srivastava (left), of the Indian Forest Survey, works with Tina Courmier of the Woods Hole Research Center and Abel Siample of the Zambia Forestry Department, to develop a map that shows the land use and carbon-sequestration capacity of India.

Under the REDD system, countries like the United States that emit a large amount of greenhouse gas could purchase carbon credits from countries like Gabon that have a lot of forest, but need cash to continue to protect it.

The system is also designed to encourage countries like Kenya to build up its forests, reversing the trend of deforestation that threatens to increase not only global carbon emissions, but also the ability of its citizens to grow food and find safe drinking water.

Using the maps, governments and tropical forest stakeholders will be able to monitor and track changes to land cover, helping inform policy decisions, said Joseph Kellndorfer, a WHRC scientist co-leading the pan-tropical mapping effort.

Tropical deforestation is estimated to be the cause of about 17 percent of man-made global carbon emissions, which makes it an easy target for combating climate change, said Dr. Kellndorfer.

“These maps give us a first estimate of what we’re talking about trading,” he said.

As the scholars taking part in the workshop indicated, deforestation is caused by a variety of factors. While logging is an obvious source, agricultural expansion—exacerbated by population pressures and a turn to the cultivation of cash crops—is also taking a major toll on tropical forests across Africa and Southeast Asia.

In Colombia, a decades-long guerilla war is having an impact even in remote forests; in Bolivia, hydroelectric projects threaten to flood the lush jungle of the Amazon basin.

The forest for the trees

Poverty is the number one barrier to forest conservation, said Edward Ssenyonjo, a remote sensing specialist with the Ugandan National Forest Authority. “More than 80 percent of people depend on the natural environment, mainly forests, to survive. This is compounded by a population growth [rate] of 3.2 percent,” he said.

His colleague, Abel Siample, of the Zambia Forestry Department, said that investment in alternatives to charcoal production and agricultural expansion are the only way to stop encroachment in protected forests.

Joint forest management committees in Zambia and India are giving disenfranchised people a say in how REDD funds are distributed, said Mukund Srivastava, of the Indian Forest Survey.

With a structure based on equality for women and the rural poor, these committees are developing a model so that a portion of REDD revenue returns to the community to attract tourism or sustainable industries and build up infrastructure.

People realize it when they hit the wall, and there is no more forest, but they cannot stop without alternatives. It’s a human dilemma: we do not change our behavior until it becomes too late.

-Nadine Laporte, associate scientist

However, said WHRC associate scientist Nadine Laporte, throwing money at the problem is not a sure way to protect diminishing forests. Sensitive to the socio-economic hardships that people in developing countries face, she is working with the scholars to find solutions to deforestation while meeting the needs of impoverished people.

“In Africa, deforestation is done by people who are trying to feed their families,” said Dr. Laporte, pointing out that people are driven to cut down the forest in a quest to find wood for cooking and heating.

Think global, act local

Peter Ndunda, of the Green Belt Movement, and WHRC Associate Scientist Nadine Laporte go over Peter's map of Kenya

Although REDD was not adopted by the UNFCCC Conference of Parties that met in Copenhagen last December, Dr. Laporte said it is only a matter of time before a global carbon-trading system is in place.

Already, there are several bilateral agreements in place between developing nations and high carbon-emitting countries and states. Progress on REDD achieved in Copenhagen will continue at the next COP meeting in Cancun, Mexico, starting in late November.

Shifting the focus of international climate talks to helping communities and developing nations solve their own problems, the field survey sessions that Dr. Laporte and her colleagues take part in reach some of the most rural or forested areas in the world.

Community capacity-building is the name of the game for Peter Ndunda, a GIS specialist with the Kenyan Green Belt Movement (GBM), a non-governmental organization founded by Nobel Peace Prize winner Wangari Maathai.

By building up tree nurseries and embarking on a nationwide tree planting campaign, the GBM has been able to stem the trend of deforestation in part of Kenya. In addition, GBM offers civic and environmental education programs that help people understand how forests help retain soil and water, thereby supporting food production and safe drinking water.

A map of Kenya's forest cover shows the GBM's progress, but huge areas in the east remain deforested.

While GBM has made great strides in the last 20 years, the biomass map Mr. Ndunda created at WHRC shows how much further the country has to go.

Indeed, great swaths of Kenya were colored in brown on his map, indicating low forest cover; while the green areas where GBM is active nonetheless indicate that human activity has spilled over the boundaries of designated conservation areas.

“How do you help communities increase their yields without compromising future generations?” Mr. Ndunda asked.

With additional income from REDD, communities will have the time to wait for the trees to grow, while also improving their farmland, he said.

“REDD provides a great opportunity to help resolve the global challenge of poverty. This is a huge economic and ecological benefit that we cannot quantify.”

If you teach a man to map…

Nguyen Hanh Quyenv, of the Vietnamese Academy of Science and Technology, works on a biomass map that she says will help her country develop forest conservation policies

Some of the scholars taking part in the WHRC workshop were able to create a map of the forest cover as well as the biomass capacity of their country.

Using readily-downloadable data from free sources like Google Earth–as well as sophisticated software and the 160 processing systems owned by the WHRC– the scholars were able to create forest-cover maps of their entire country with a 15-meter resolution, and biomass maps with 500 meters resolution.

Another benefit offered through the WHRC program is the use of satellite radar imaging, a powerful tool that can penetrate the cloud cover that tends to persist over tropical forests, Dr. Kellndorfer said.

That way, forest managers will have more accurate “snapshots” of a forest region, without gaps in data due to cloud cover.

That was a difficulty for Edersson Cabrera, a remote sensing expert with the Colombian ministry of the environment. Though he has been collecting data on the country’s diverse range of forests for the past two decades, thick cloud cover in some years led to gaps in knowledge about how land use had changed over time.

Eric Armijo, of the Friends of Nature Foundation in Bolivia, said the maps he is working on with the WHRC will give his organization the tools it needs to make sure conservation policies are in place— and working.

“It’s a powerful way of pushing the decision-makers,” he said.

Nora Greenglass, a research assistant at the Woods Hole Research Center, shared her impressions as a negotiator for the UN program for Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation (REDD) with members of the Woods Hole Science and Technology Education Partnership (WHSTEP) last week.

Nora Greenglass shares her impressions of the UN climate change conference with members of WHSTEP

From Falmouth to Copenhagen

Nora Greenglass was among 8,000 party negotiators in Copenhagen, as world governments, NGO’s, and activist groups converged on the Danish capital for COP 15.

It was not her first UN climate conference, but the first one where she had to wait for five hours in the snow with other accredited observers, just to get into the conference hall.

That’s when the observers did just what 30,000 climate change activists had been doing over the course of the 2-week conference: they protested.

“They barred civil society from entering when the heads of state were there. It was a bone of contention. This was supposed to be an open process,” she said. “Needless to say, I did not get much work done that day.”

Ms. Greenglass went to Denmark with a team of other researchers from WHRC (and other Woods Hole Consortium participants from the MBL and WHOI) to give scientific input on aspects of climate change that rarely make the headline news.  Among those are the REDD initiative and the impacts of rising greenhouse gas emissions on the world’s oceans.

The UN-REDD Programme is aimed at tipping the economic balance in favour of sustainable management of forests so that their formidable economic, environmental and social goods and services benefit countries, communities and forest users while also contributing to important reductions in greenhouse gas emissions… The immediate goal is to assess whether carefully structured payment structures and capacity support can create the incentives to ensure actual, lasting, achievable, reliable and measurable emission reductions while maintaining and improving the other ecosystem services forests provide.

-the UN Collaborative Program on REDD

Reducing poverty and emissions?

The main purpose of the conference this year was to develop a “cap and trade” system for carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions. With the Kyoto Protocol past its prime, the outcome of Copenhagen was meant to set a new blueprint for setting emissions reduction targets, and ways to measure progress toward those goals.

However, negotiations broke down between developing nations and some of the biggest emitters (including the BASIC countries, Brazil, South Africa, India, and China) on the terms of such a high-stakes deal.

From the point of view of the developing nations (led by Africa), the system would allow industrialized countries to keep polluting, thus endangering their chances of survival. In the case of small island nations or places where desertification threatens arable crop land, climate change is indeed a matter of life or death.

But as Ms. Greenglass pointed out, the countries that produce the lion’s share of CO2 need to act now to reduce their emissions, and need  incentives to do so.

The World is Waiting for US

Despite the worldliness of the conference, Ms. Greenglass said that the elephant in the room was legislation currently stalled before the US Senate. (Last fall, the House of Representatives passed a bill that would require polluters to offset their greenhouse gas emissions, but a Senate version is not expected to pass.)

“The world is waiting for Congress, and we know where that’s going,” she said.

President Obama made an attempt to save the day, crafting an 11th-hour document known as the Copenhagen Accord, with 29 other nations (out of 194). Among other things, this non-binding document states that the US will reduce its emissions by 17% (from 2005 levels) by 2020. However, this pledge requires congressional approval– in an election year, in a recession.

A few positives did come out of Denmark in the waning days of the conference, Ms. Greenglass said.

• The REDD negotiations are nearly complete, with a “relatively prominent” place in US legislation, and a favorable view from US industry.
• In addition, the US pledged $100 billion to go towards climate adaptation measures, technology transfer, and forest protection for vulnerable countries by 2020.
• The US pledged $1 billion to help implement REDD; an additional $3.5 billion was committed by France, Norway, Australia, Japan, and the UK.
• An agreement was made on a transparent mechanism for evaluating the performance of each nation’s emissions reductions through an independent review process.

Pat Harcourt, an education specialist with WBNERR, asked how much of a role science plays in determining the outcome of policy.

Ms. Greenglass said that the specific targets, such as the 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees F) maximum for global temperature rise, are based on sound  science, but overall, the negotiations are “frighteningly political.”

“We need to peak global emissions by 2020,” she told WHSTEP members.

These days, Ms. Greenglass and thousands of other science policy consultants are heading back to the drawing board in preparation for COP 16, this November, in Cancun, Mexico.