With its 477,274 km2 of Amazon rainforest and about 10% of the world’s biodiversity, Colombia wants to partake of the economic benefits that will bring on the initiative to pay for emission reductions caused by deforesting and forest degradation (known by the acronym, REDD), as soon as an agreement is reached about its implementation. But before achieving said results, the country must know exactly what it has to offer.

For this reason, while negotiations at the United Nations seek to arrive at a consensus on the theme (the next meeting shall be held in Mexico in December), the country prepares itself to quantify its carbon stock.

With a technical support evaluated in US$2,5 million from the North American foundation Betty & Gordon Moore, specialists from Colombia are deciding which is the technology that best suits the country’s needs to measure and monitor emissions caused by deforesting and forest degradation, as well as the potential for carbon capture.

“REDD seeks to offer incentives to reduce the deforestation of jungles and strengthen conservation in developing countries, though precisely because they are developing countries, the technological challenge is greater”, explains Maria Claudia Garcia, project coordinator and employee of the Institute for Hydrology, Meteorology and Environmental Studies of Colombia (IDEAM).

Aside from the Amazon region, the monitoring will include key-zones throughout the country such as the Biogeographical Chocó (district), high mountain ecosystems, the Atlantic coast and so forth. “Colombia is the perfect country in which to conduct monitoring experiments because it has five countries in one, with very distinctive geographical regions”, stated Garcia. Most systems were designed for the Amazon region and for the humid woodlands of Asia but were not conceived for mountain regions, the Caribbean coast or the Pacific, he points out.

A team of ten IDEAM employees works on the project and is aware that they must develop systems which are compatible with those of other countries, so that a single technological language can be spoken on a global level. Therefore they are evaluating the advantages of distinct geoprocessing systems.

Learning from Brazil’s experience

Colombia begins to resort on the path opened up by Brazil. This nation pioneered on satellite forest monitoring, therefore, some of the mechanisms being considered are similar to those employed by Brazil’s National Institute for Space Research (INPE), known as the Deter and the Prodes.

Deter, an acronym for Real-Time Deforesting Detection, employs low resolution images which are obtained every 15 days, while Prodes, stands for Amazon Deforesting Monitoring Program and it enables zooming in on specific zones, as Ederson Cabrera, a Remote Sensors Image Processing Coordinator, explains.

Since last year, Colombian employees have been exchanging views with Brazilian colleagues in order to learn more about these systems. However, Colombian reality is very different from Brazil’s own, since while in Brazil there are major deforesting locations of thousands of hectares, in Colombia, especially in the Amazon region, there are small but well distributed deforested areas. “With some of the image obtaining techniques used in Brazil, such zones would be easily overlooked”, points out Cabrera.

That is why other monitoring methods are also being considered: one from Holland currently adopted in Borneo, Indonesia and the Guiana and another from the Woods Hole Research Center which is used in several tropical forests around the world and there’s yet another methodology employed by the Carnegie Institute that was developed for lowland forests in Brazil.

The project is scheduled to be concluded by June 2011, therefore, it is expected that by then Colombia will define in which manner its system will work.

Field monitoring

Visualizar Satélite Colombia em um mapa maior

However, at the same time in which the most adequate remote sensing mechanisms are being defined, field verification parameters are also being sought. To this end, the best equations to calculate the carbon content in Amazon region and in the Andes are being analyzed and which, thanks to climate conditions, have a biomass with very different characteristics.

In this respect, Brazil is also acting as an advisor to Colombia. Employees from the National Institute for Amazonian Research (INPA) help out with technical recommendations. The idea is to see how satellite data can be incorporated into the field calculations to produce a national map containing biomass values and the carbon content from each region of the country”, says Adriana Yepes, coordinator of field classification.

Therefore, the goal is to enable non-governmental organizations to make these technologies more accessible to native communities and to afro-descendants so that they too can check the situation of the forests they live in.

First map

While IDEAM employees progress with their monitoring, the Amazonian Institute for Scientific Investigations (Sinchi) prepares itself for releasing next month, the first map of vegetation cover of Amazonas, with information collected in 2002. Sinchi estimates show that Colombia has a deforesting rate of 101.3 thousand hectares a year.

This is the first step towards obtaining consolidated data of how the deforesting process advances in the Colombian Amazon Rainforest, explains Daniel Fonseca, the Institute’s scientific assistant director. There will be updates every 5 years, although 2007 data will be ready in approximately three months.

“This is useful for one to know the state of the earth cover and identify the main forces that are changing the territory” says Fonseca. “In continuing the development of this map, one can establish a baseline of how the territory is and periodically ascertain the degree of change, whether advancing, receding or stabilizing regarding the different types of vegetation cover”, explains the assistant director.

“The first map of vegetation cover enables us to make an assessment in terms of climate changes in order to establish adaptation or mitigation measures”, points out Fonseca. “This offers the country the opportunity to deal with conservation-related issues”. (Translation Robert Rajabally)

María Clara Valencia is a Colombian journalist with a background in literary studies and a strong interest in the environment. She holds a Bachelor’s in Literary Studies, a Graduate Specialization in Journalism and a Master’s in Mass Communication. Over the past five years, María Clara has worked as a journalist for El Tiempo newspaper in Colombia. In that time she has covered topics relating to the environment, climate change, the economy, energy and agriculture.