Assessment of forest carbon stocks for REDD+ implementation in the muyong forest system of Ifugao, Philippines
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Assessment of forest carbon stocks for REDD+ implementation in the muyong forest system of Ifugao, Philippines Ram Avtar
&
Kenichi Tsusaka & Srikantha Herath
Received: 3 March 2020 / Accepted: 28 July 2020 # Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020
Abstract Forests hold significant potential for carbon sequestration and climate change mitigation. Forest biomass estimation is vital for sustainable forest management, providing critical input data for implementing the United Nations Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and forest Degradation-plus (REDD+) mechanism. This study investigates the total carbon pools—aboveground biomass (AGB), belowground biomass (BGB), forest floor biomass, and soil carbon—using field-based information in the muyong forest management system, which is native to Ifugao in the Philippines. This study reveals that a difference may be observed between the total carbon stock of the private woodlots (muyong) and that of the communal forest (bilid). The results indicate that the bilid forest has trees with a small diameter at breast height (DBH) and high tree density in contrast to the muyong, which has trees with high DBH and low tree density. The average carbon stock per unit area is higher in muyong (150.8 tC/ha) than in bilid (126.1 tC/ ha). These findings are valuable in determining whether Ifugao’s muyong forest system should be included
R. Avtar (*) Faculty of Environmental Earth Science, Hokkaido University, Sapporo, Japan e-mail: [email protected] K. Tsusaka Institute for the Advanced Studies of Sustainability (UNU-IAS), United Nations University, Tokyo, Japan S. Herath Ministry of Megapolis and Western Development, Battaramulla, Sri Lanka
under the REDD+ framework. Human mediation and management helps forests to sequester a greater amount of carbon than they would without human intervention. Implementation of REDD+ should promote Ifugao’s ecosystem and biodiversity conservation and agroforestry practices in addition to protecting traditional agricultural practices and livelihoods in relation to rice terraces. Keywords Forest carbon stocks . REDD+ . Muyong . Climate change mitigation
Introduction Tropical forests are important carbon reservoirs, storing large quantities of biomass over long periods compared with agriculture and other systems (Ravindranath and Ostwald 2008; Avtar et al. 2013a). They also fulfill an important role in the global carbon cycle because they act as reservoirs during succession and sources when deforested or degraded by natural or human disturbances (Marín-Spiotta and Sharma 2013). Continued deforestation and forest degradation pose the threat of releasing large amounts of carbon, which may exacerbate the effects of climate change. The Philippines is one of the world’s seventeen countries recognized as megadiverse and is particularly vulnerable to climate change (World Bank 2010). The total area of forest cover in the Philippines is 8.4 million hectares with 1160 million tons of aboveground biomass (AGB) in forests and other woodlands (FAO-FRA 2015). The
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