Browsing by Author "Lovett, Jon C."

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Getting ready for REDD+ in Tanzania: a case study of progress and challenges
(Fauna & Flora International, 2010) Dalsgaard, SØren; Funder, Mikkel; Hagelberg, Niklas; Harrison, Paul; Haule, Christognus; Kabalimu, Kekilia; Kilahama, Felician; Kilawe, Edward; Lewis, Simon L.; Lovett, Jon C.; Lyatuu, Gertrude; Marshall, Andrew R.; Meshack, Charles; Miles, Lera; Milledge, Simon A.H.; Munishi, Pantaleo K.T.; Nashanda, Evarist; Shirima, Deo; Swetnam, Ruth D.; Willcock, Simon; Williams, Andrew; Zahabu, Eliakim; Burgess, Neil D.; Bahane, Bruno; Clairs, Tim; Danielsen, Finn
The proposed mechanism for Reducing Emis- sions from Deforestation and Degradation (REDD+) offers significant potential for conserving forests to reduce negative impacts of climate change. Tanzania is one of nine pilot countries for the United Nations REDD Pro- gramme, receives significant funding from the Norwegian, Finnish and German governments and is a participant in the World Bank’s Forest Carbon Partnership Facility. In combination, these interventions aim to mitigate green-house gas emissions, provide an income to rural commu- nities and conserve biodiversity. The establishment of the UN-REDD Programme in Tanzania illustrates real-world challenges in a developing country. These include currently inadequate baseline forestry data sets (needed to calculate reference emission levels), inadequate government capacity and insufficient experience of implementing REDD+-type measures at operational levels. Additionally, for REDD+ to succeed, current users of forest resources must adopt new practices, including the equitable sharing of benefits that accrue from REDD+ implementation. These challenges are being addressed by combined donor support to im- plement a national forest inventory, remote sensing of forest cover, enhanced capacity for measuring, reporting and verification, and pilot projects to test REDD+ imple- mentation linked to the existing Participatory Forest Man- agement Programme. Our conclusion is that even in a country with considerable donor support, progressive forest policies, laws and regulations, an extensive network of managed forests and increasingly developed locally-based forest management approaches, implementing REDD+ pre- sents many challenges. These are being met by coordinated, genuine partnerships between government, non-government and community-based agencies.
Towards regional, error-bounded landscape carbon storage estimates for data-deficient areas of the world
(PLOS ONE, 2012-09-14) Willcock, Simon; Phillips, Oliver L.; Platts, Philip J; Balmford, Andrew; Burgess, Neil D.; Lovett, Jon C.; Ahrends, Antje; Mbilinyi, Boniface; Lewis, Simon L.
Monitoring landscape carbon storage is critical for supporting and validating climate change mitigation policies. These may be aimed at reducing deforestation and degradation, or increasing terrestrial carbon storage at local, regional and global levels. However, due to data-deficiencies, default global carbon storage values for given land cover types such as ‘lowland tropical forest’ are often used, termed ‘Tier 1 type’ analyses by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Such estimates may be erroneous when used at regional scales. Furthermore uncertainty assessments are rarely provided leading to estimates of land cover change carbon fluxes of unknown precision which may undermine efforts to properly evaluate land cover policies aimed at altering land cover dynamics. Here, we present a repeatable method to estimate carbon storage values and associated 95% confidence intervals (CI) for all five IPCC carbon pools (aboveground live carbon, litter, coarse woody debris, belowground live carbon and soil carbon) for data-deficient regions, using a combination of existing inventory data and systematic literature searches, weighted to ensure the final values are regionally specific. The method meets the IPCC ‘Tier 2’ reporting standard. We use this method to estimate carbon storage over an area of33.9 million hectares of eastern Tanzania, reporting values for 30 land cover types. We estimate that this area stored 6.33 (5.92–6.74) Pg C in the year 2000. Carbon storage estimates for the same study area extracted from five published Africa-wide or global studies show a mean carbon storage value of ,50% of that reported using our regional values, with four of the five studies reporting lower carbon storage values. This suggests that carbon storage may have been underestimated for this region of Africa. Our study demonstrates the importance of obtaining regionally appropriate carbon storage estimates, and shows how such values can be produced for a relatively low investment.