Uncertainties in estimating the potential for carbon mitigation of forest management

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Forestry and agroforestry are promising land use alternatives for reducing the increasing concentrations of global atmospheric carbon (C). Various methodological approaches to estimate the impact of forestry and agroforestry on C fluxes have been proposed. Uncertainties are inevitable in any estimate of greenhouse gas (GHG) dynamics, caused by differing interpretations of source and sink category or other definitions, assumptions, and units, the use of simplified representations with averaged values, uncertainty in the basic socioeconomic activity data that drive the calculations, and inherent uncertainty in the scientific understanding of the basic processes leading to emissions and removals. In this study, a proposal of a forest management project was used to identify the main sources of uncertainties in the calculation of the GHG-offset impact. Errors in the calculations were related to (i) classification of land-use/land-cover (LU/LC) types, with observed differences of up to around 8% in land cover estimates, (ii) estimation of C stocks within each LU/LC type, with errors varying from around 13 to 34% in total C stock, (iii) historical evidence of LU/LC changes and related GHG fluxes applied in baselines, giving rise to uncertainties of up to about 16%, whereas varying baseline assumptions produced differences between 31 and 73% in the C mitigation calculations, with levels of uncertainty of up to 74%, and (iv) variation in parameter values to calculate C fluxes generated uncertainties of up to around 10%. eng

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