Why we need to raise awareness
We need to continue raising awareness of the role which forestry has on climate change and the sustainable use of biologically productive supply chains. This interesting paper here by Hans Verkerk and the team at European Forest Institute (EFI) highlights it's role in decarbonisation.
"Forests and forestry can play an important role in this context; reducing deforestation and forest degradation lowers greenhouse emissions, forest management can maintain or enhance forest carbon stocks and sinks and wood products can store carbon over the long-term and can substitute for emissions-intensive materials reducing emissions."
In the last 12 months, for example, GSI has measured over 70 million acres of forestry in the USA and Canada much of which is being targeted at Climate-Smart Forestry measures
Avoiding deforestation is especially important in tropical regions, such as Latin America and Southeast Asia, where the production of commodities such as soy, beef, palm oil, coffee, cocoa is responsible for over 60% of the conversion of forests into agricultural land (Curtis et al., 2018)
"Climate change will strongly affect humans and ecosystems, especially if the global average temperature rise will exceed 1.5 °C (IPCC, 2018). There is thus a need to adapt to the impacts of climate change in addition to the need to mitigate climate change. Unfortunately, mitigation and adaptation are often not considered together in national strategies for implementing actions under the Paris Agreement (i.e. Nationally Determined Contributions) (Nordic Council of Ministers, 2017; Seddon et al., 2019)."
Here, the EFI argue that "a Climate-Smart Forestry (CSF) is a necessary, but still missing component in these strategies. CSF aims to connect mitigation with adaption measures, enhance the resilience of forest resources and ecosystem services, and meet the needs of a growing population and expanding middle class."
Satellite analytics make Forest Measurement possible at a macro level providing due diligence into new forest investments and validating good forest stewardship
Here at GSI, we observe that serious economic support for these initiatives requires continuous measurement of forestry on a regional and national scale to validate good forest stewardship and due diligence into new forest investments.
Reporting and transparency into current forest asset conditions is necessary to encourage the forest investments and policies which will shape how effective Climate-Smart Forestry proves to be. While it is a complex task to measure natural resources effectively on this scale, these resources can now be measured by satellite analytics.
In the last 12 months, for example, GSI has measured over 70 million acres of forestry in the USA and Canada much of which is being targeted at Climate-Smart Forestry measures. We will be surveying many more millions of acres using our satellite data analytical platform in the coming months supporting forest investment and good forest management practices.
-Source: European Forest Institute (EFI)