Users of a new digital platform from NGO 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 the 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 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.
However, because trees are so effective at storing carbon dioxide, when forests are degraded, cut, or burned, they release enormous amounts of carbon back into the atmosphere. With areas of Southeast Asia and the Amazon already net carbon emitters as a result of numerous human-caused stressors, recent research have indicated that many forests are on the verge of reaching a tipping point that impairs their ability to store carbon.
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 closes this gap. Making better science-based judgments is a “game changer,” according to him, for governments, investors, and organizations 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.”
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 closes this gap. Making better science-based judgments is a “game changer,” according to him, for governments, investors, and organizations all across the world.
The platform is helpful for environmentalists and human rights organizations as well as policymakers and investors because it gives them access to open-source data at the international and national levels, allowing them to hold institutions accountable for their commitments.
