Technology and Forest Conservation

I just read a fascinating article from the Science and Technology section of The Economist. The essence of the article is about a new lidar monitoring technology (The Economist is calling it a Lidar-tector) which is a light detection and ranging system that works by broadcasting electromagnetic waves towards a target and then building up a picture from the reflection. This technology is now being used for forest conservation purposes to determine the carbon content of trees. How does it work?:

"In the case of lidar, the waves are in the form of an infra-red laser beam. And in the case of the forests of south-western Nepal, the target is the trees. During a forest survey, an aircraft-borne lidar sweeps a beam that fires about 70,000 pulses a second over the canopy. A sensor on the aircraft records the time it takes to receive the backscattering of pulses, and that is used to compute distances to the forest canopy and to the soil beneath".

Further:

"The result, when processed through the computers of Arbonaut, a Finnish natural-resource-management company, is a three-dimensional image of the forest that can be correlated with, and calibrated by, the efforts of the chaps with the tape measures. And that, in turn, can be used to estimate the amount of carbon stored in the plot examined, and extrapolated to calculate the carbon stored in larger areas of forest that have been scanned by lidar, but not measured with tapes."

In the world of carbon sequestration projects, there is a lot of mendacity and mistrust when it comes to reporting numbers. In particular, policymakers and scientists are keen to know the carbon content of various forests to determine which ones are more worthy of preservation than others. While this may sound absurd, it is useful information for carbon trading scheme projects (which I do not completely agree with and will blog about shortly). Additionally, it provides further impetus to contain these forests and allow them to sequester carbon. In so doing, countries like Nepal can:



"participate in international carbon-trading schemes that pay poor countries with lots of trees not to cut them down. The Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation (REDD) scheme agreed at the United Nations’ climate-change conference in Cancún last December may eventually be worth $30 billion a year. Nepal wants a slice of that. Lidar monitoring may provide a way of making sure it is delivering on its side of the bargain".

Whether the purpose of this project is ethically or environmentally sound is open to debate. Either way, it will hopefully allow countries like Nepal to preserve forested areas not least for the amount of money they can receive from REDD, but for the preservation of vulnerable ecosystems.