Russia is the world’s largest forest country. Being home to more than a fifth of forests globally, the country’s forests and forestry have enormous potential to contribute to making a global impact in terms of climate mitigation. A new study by IIASA researchers, Russian experts, and other international colleagues have produced new estimates of biomass contained in Russian forests, confirming a substantial increase over the last few decades.
Since the dissolution of the USSR, Russia has been reporting almost no changes in its forests, while data obtained from remote sensing products indicate that Russian forests have in fact experienced an increase in vegetation productivity, tree cover, and above-ground biomass in the last few decades. This has led to inconsistencies in available data and a general decline in the reliability of information on Russian forests since 1988, which can be attributed to an information gap that appeared when Russia moved from the Soviet Forest Inventory and Planning system to its current National Forest Inventory (NFI) for the collection of forest information at the national scale. The first cycle of the Russian NFI was finalized in 2020. The authors of a new IIASA-led study published in Nature Scientific Reports have used this data in combination with research forest plots on the ground and remote sensing data in an advanced analysis to produce a new estimate of the biomass of Russian forests, confirming these forests’ climate change impact and their importance for climate change mitigation.
Read More: International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis
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