Global carbon stocks and potential emissions due to mangrove deforestation from 2000 to 2012
📝 Abstract
Mangrove forests store high densities of organic carbon compared to other forested ecosystems. High carbon storage coupled with high rates of deforestation means that mangroves contribute substantially to carbon emissions. Thus, mangroves are candidates for inclusion in Intended Nationally Determined Contributions (INDCs) to the UNFCC Payments for Ecosystem Services (PES) program. This study quantifies two datasets required for INDCs and PES reporting. These are annual mangrove carbon stocks from 2000 to 2012 at the global, national, and sub-national levels and global carbon emissions resulting from deforestation. Mangroves stored 4.19 Pg of carbon in 2012, with Indonesia, Brazil, Malaysia, and Papua New Guinea accounting for greater than 50% of this stock. 2.96 Pg of the global carbon stock is contained within the soil and 1.23 Pg in the living biomass. Two percent of global mangrove carbon was lost between 2000 and 2012, equivalent to a maximum potential of 316,996,250 t of CO2 emissions.
💡 Analysis
Mangrove forests store high densities of organic carbon compared to other forested ecosystems. High carbon storage coupled with high rates of deforestation means that mangroves contribute substantially to carbon emissions. Thus, mangroves are candidates for inclusion in Intended Nationally Determined Contributions (INDCs) to the UNFCC Payments for Ecosystem Services (PES) program. This study quantifies two datasets required for INDCs and PES reporting. These are annual mangrove carbon stocks from 2000 to 2012 at the global, national, and sub-national levels and global carbon emissions resulting from deforestation. Mangroves stored 4.19 Pg of carbon in 2012, with Indonesia, Brazil, Malaysia, and Papua New Guinea accounting for greater than 50% of this stock. 2.96 Pg of the global carbon stock is contained within the soil and 1.23 Pg in the living biomass. Two percent of global mangrove carbon was lost between 2000 and 2012, equivalent to a maximum potential of 316,996,250 t of CO2 emissions.
📄 Content
1
Global carbon stocks and potential emissions due to mangrove deforestation from 2000 to 2012
Stuart Hamilton* Department of Geography and Geosciences Salisbury University Salisbury MD 21801, USA sehamilton@salisbury.edu +1 410-543-6460
Daniel A. Friess
Department of Geography
National University of Singapore
Singapore 117570
dan.friess@nus.edu.sg
+65 6516 1419
2
Mangrove forests store high densities of organic carbon compared to other forested ecosystems. High carbon storage coupled with high rates of deforestation means that mangroves contribute substantially to carbon emissions. Thus, mangroves are candidates for inclusion in Intended Nationally Determined Contributions (INDCs) to the UNFCC Payments for Ecosystem Services (PES) program. This study quantifies two datasets required for INDCs and PES reporting. These are annual mangrove carbon stocks from 2000 to 2012 at the global, national, and sub-national levels and global carbon emissions resulting from deforestation. Mangroves stored 4.19 Pg of carbon in 2012, with Indonesia, Brazil, Malaysia, and Papua New Guinea accounting for greater than 50% of this stock. 2.96 Pg of the global carbon stock is contained within the soil and 1.23 Pg in the living biomass. Two percent of global mangrove carbon was lost between 2000 and 2012, equivalent to a maximum potential of 316,996,250 t of CO2 emissions.
Forestry, agriculture, and other land use changes account for almost 25% (up to 12 Pg CO2-e yr-1) of anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions, due to factors such as deforestation, forest degradation and biomass burning 1. The deforestation of tropical coastal wetlands such as mangrove forests contributes disproportionately to anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions, as they mangrove forests can hold up to four times as much organic carbon per unit area when compared to other terrestrial forested ecosystems 2 and are undergoing deforestation across the tropics 3, 4. Recent estimates have put global mangrove deforestation rates at up to 0.39% per year since 2000 4, driven primarily by large-scale agricultural and aquacultural commodity production, 3, 5, 6, 7 coastal development 3, 5, 6, 7, and sea level rise 8. High carbon densities per unit area coupled with high deforestation rates mean that globally mangrove deforestation may be contributing as much as 0.21 Pg CO2-e yr-1 or 0.45 Pg CO2-e yr-1 to the atmosphere 2, 9. Mangrove deforestation is so high in particular countries such as Indonesia that halting deforestation has been estimated to reduce its national land use sector emissions by between 10% and 31% 10. As a result, carbon stored in coastal wetlands such as mangroves has recently been placed on the international policy agenda 3
through the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) Paris Agreement in 2015 11. Due to this inclusion, emissions from wetlands are now explicitly considered in national greenhouse gas emissions reporting through the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)’s wetland supplement to the Guidelines for National Greenhouse Gas Inventories 12.
The Paris Agreement also provides new opportunities for mangrove conservation, as it promoted novel funding avenues for the financing of forest protection. Several conservation mechanisms have recently been established or proposed that utilize vegetated carbon stocks as a financial incentive to reduce deforestation, under the broad umbrella of PES. PES is broadly defined as a set of “voluntary transactions between service users and service providers that are conditional on agreed rules of natural resource management” 13 p.8. For example, PES schemes such as Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Degradation (REDD+) incentivize conservation through ‘avoided deforestation,’ with a service buyer paying a service provider to store carbon that would otherwise be emitted due to land cover change. Payments for avoided deforestation are increasingly advanced in terrestrial forest conservation, and such an approach is rapidly gaining traction in mangrove research and policymaking under the term “blue carbon” 14, 15. Blue carbon is quickly gaining international prominence as a conservation tool through groups such as the International Blue Carbon Initiative and is the focus of several bilateral government frameworks, such as the International Blue Carbon Partnership between Australia and Indonesia. Case studies have shown that the financial benefits accrued from the sale of blue carbon credits could potentially outweigh financial returns from alternative land uses at the local scale 16, and thus provide an economically viable alternative to some proximate drivers of mangrove deforestation and degradation.
The calculation of both the emissions from land cover change in national greenhouse gas inventories, and the calculation of ecosystem service loss for PES interventions require robust inform
This content is AI-processed based on ArXiv data.