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Forest carbon fluxes

A satellite perspective

Nature Climate Change volume 6, pages 346–348 (2016)Cite this article

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Reducing deforestation and forest degradation offers a quick win for climate mitigation. Using satellite data we are now able to better constrain pantropical estimates of forest loss, reshaping our understanding of the annual to decadal variability in land sources and sinks in the global carbon cycle.

Smoke plumes billowed from Borneo and Brazil in 2015, brought on by El Niño conditions that allowed fires to burn through tropical forests and peatlands. The damage from these fires, as measured by greenhouse gas emissions, depends on the amount of carbon stored in these tropical forest ecosystems. Writing in Nature Climate Change in 2012, Baccini et al.1 used NASA satellite data to map tropical forest carbon stocks. Those data formed the foundation of a revised estimate of the net carbon fluxes from tropical forests, helping to shape the policy efforts to Reduce Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation (REDD+), a core component of the Paris Agreement2.

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Figure 1: Carbon emissions from human activity — including tropical deforestation — since the launch of Landsat 5 in 1984.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Douglas C. Morton is at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Maryland 20771, USA,

    Douglas C. Morton

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  1. Douglas C. Morton
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Correspondence to Douglas C. Morton.

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Morton, D. A satellite perspective. Nature Clim Change 6, 346–348 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1038/nclimate2978

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