Reducing uncertainties on carbon emissions from tropical deforestation: Brazil Amazon study case

In the last year, Brazil announced the voluntary commitment to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions from 36.1% to 38.9% by 2020 and, to this end, such a commitment requires cutting down 80% of the deforestation in the Amazon rainforest until that year. Much of the uncertainty on the role of forests for carbon emissions is due to the lack of reliable deforestation data. The Brazilian’s National Institute for Space Research (INPE) carries on, since 1988, annual surveys of deforestation in the Amazon, an area of about 5 million km2. The existence of historic data on deforestation allows us to constrain the contribution of land cover change to greenhouse gases emissions since 40 years. Our work estimate the carbon emission rates for the Brazilian Amazon, combining annual maps of new clearings and spatial information on biomass distribution for different vegetation types. The model also incorporates the temporal dynamics related to the deforestation process and its intraregional heterogeneity, including the percentage emitted by successive burning along the years and biological decay, the percentage of biomass used as timber, contribution of bellow ground emissions by root decay, and secondary vegetation growth.