Counting Terrestrial Sources and Sinks of Carbon

Abstract

One of the issues that the nations of the world need to resolve for reducingemissions of greenhousegases is the accounting of terrestrial sources and sinks of carbon. If noneare counted, then an incentive to reducedeforestation is lost, although attention becomes more focused on reducingemissions of carbon from fossil fuels.At the other extreme, counting all terrestrial sources and sinks of carbonwould be both expensive and inequitable.The most logical approach is to count those sources and sinks that resulteither directly or indirectly from humanactivity, but scientifically this is difficult, if not impossible: methodsexist for measuring changes in terrestrial carbonstocks, but they do not currently exist for attributing measured changes tohuman-induced, as opposed to natural,processes. The most feasible option seems to be the one that the KyotoProtocol recognizes: counting changes incarbon storage that result from a limited number of activities.