Estimation of carbon budget through carbon emission-sequestration and valuation of ecosystem services in the extended part of Chota Nagpur Plateau (India)

Abstract

Natural capitals provide multiple ecosystem services (ESs) to people. In the recent years, Ayodhya hill range (Eastern India) experiences in different incidents like large scale deforestation, forestland conversion, forest fires and execution of different developmental projects. The principal objectives of this research are (i) to determine the spatiotemporal changing pattern of ESVs through different unit values (ES value coefficient) for the years 1975, 2000 and 2021 (ii) to compute the carbon sequestration through InVEST carbon model and carbon emission using different emission coefficient values (iii) to measure the gross primary product (GPP) using MOD17 model. The ESVs result showed that total ESVs over Ayodhya hill range were 256.67, 258.60 and 239.78 M USD for 1975, 2000 and 2021 respectively. Total 16.90 M USD losses have been observed within the study period. Cropland has the highest ESVs due to its high unit values and areal extension. Total 1000759 mg C reduction of stored carbon has been estimated whereas a sharp decline of GPP (97.03 gC m−2 yr−1) was measured during the period (1975–2021). Carbon emission of Ayodhya hill range was 169.484, 280.549 and 374.670 t for 1975, 2000 and 2021 respectively. Moreover, total 123983 mg C will be declined in the predicted year 2040 in respect to 2021 while 3.32 M USD losses of ESVs will be estimated for the year 2040. Here, the ESC (Ecological support coefficient) index value is less than 1 that means the region has less capacity of carbon sequestration compared with carbon emission. So, sustainable environmental management techniques should immediately execute to recover the health of natural environment.