Abstract
Spatially explicit monitoring of tropical forest aboveground carbon is an important prerequisite for better targeting and assessing forest conservation efforts and more transparent reporting of carbon losses. Here, we combine near-real-time forest disturbance alerts based on all-weather radar data with aboveground carbon stocks to provide carbon loss estimates at high spatial and temporal resolution for the rainforests of Africa. We identified spatial and temporal hotspots of carbon loss for 2019 and 2020 for the 23 countries analyzed, led by different drivers of forest disturbance. We found that 75.7% of total annual carbon loss in the Central African Republic happened within the first three months of 2020, while 89% of the annual carbon loss in Madagascar occurred within the last five months of 2020. Our detailed spatiotemporal mapping of carbon loss creates opportunities for much more transparent, timely, and efficient assessments of forest carbon changes both at the level of specific activities, for national-level GHG reporting, and large area comparative analysis.
Highlights
Explicit monitoring of tropical forest aboveground carbon is an important prerequisite for better targeting and assessing forest conservation efforts and more transparent reporting of carbon losses
60% of forest disturbances in Gabon are due to selective logging and more than 90% of disturbances in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) and the Central African Republic are due to small-scale agriculture[8]
From countries with at least 1 MtC emitted in the two years analyzed, Madagascar had the highest annual increase in carbon loss (+153.9%), while Equatorial Guinea is the only country with a decrease in carbon loss (−20.1%)
Summary
Explicit monitoring of tropical forest aboveground carbon is an important prerequisite for better targeting and assessing forest conservation efforts and more transparent reporting of carbon losses. International and national initiatives related to the Paris Climate Agreement stimulate and implement targeted activities for avoiding tropical forest loss[2] Their success, depends on suitable information on where and why forests are changing to define suitable policies and actions, to support implementation and enforcement on the ground, and to provide robust reporting on the progress and performance of such activities[3,4]. Forest carbon monitoring efforts have evolved, but limited spatial detail and timeliness hinder their usefulness for tracking collective progress towards forest-specific climate mitigation goals. This is a particular issue for Africa’s humid forest changes that remain poorly understood and quantified[5,6]. West and East African tropical forests, including Madagascar, have lost almost all the forest extent in the last decades[9], while the last two largest tropical forest fragments in Africa, both located in the DRC are at immediate threat due to continuing expansion of rural populations into remote forests[10]
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