Berkeley Lab
New project awarded
Advanced MRV protocols for soil and forest carbon sequestration using dynamic modeling and remote sensing
Advanced MRV protocols for soil and forest carbon sequestration using dynamic modeling and remote sensing
Project is funded by the DOE Office of Fossil Energy and Carbon Management (FECM) and Office of Technology Transitions (OTT).
Vegetation biomass and soil carbon storage-based approaches for carbon dioxide removal (CDR) are critical pathways to reach net-zero CO2 emissions, amounting to 2 GT CO2/yr or 5% of total emissions, the vast majority of all CDR globally Three major types of forest carbon credits are currently in use: avoided deforestation, improved forest management (IFM), and either reforestation or afforestation through forest planting. Support of these efforts through market-based approaches such as carbon credits or carbon offsets requires the use of clear protocols to quantify the impact of a given strategy as compared to a counterfactual case where no action was taken.
Current protocols assume a fixed probability of disturbance due to fire or other natural processes, despite climate models projecting that fire, drought, and other risks will increase in a warming climate. Furthermore, existing forest carbon credit protocols focus largely on carbon storage in vegetation biomass, mostly ignoring critical and more-stabilized carbon storage in forest soils.
We will develop tools to monitor and project forest dynamics for forest-based carbon dioxide removal projects, using a vegetation demography model informed by remote sensing and in situ observations. We will use this approach to better characterize dynamic baselines for calculation of carbon credits, as well as to take into account changing climate risk of forest carbon reversal due to wildfire and other disturbance processes.
