Climate researchers from the University of Copenhagen and NASA have developed a method that has now mapped several billion trees and their carbon uptake in Africa’s Sahel. In the future, the method could be used to monitor whether climate credit purchases have a positive effect on the number of trees and whether nature restoration is working.
The purchase of indulgences for CO2 emissions is gaining steam among global corporations. Carbon offset credits allow companies to emit a given amount of CO2 in exchange for the greenhouse gas being neutralized elsewhere, in the form of trees planted or left unfelled.
But with billions upon billions of trees across the planet, keeping track of how many are added and how many are disappearing is tough, to say the least. Now, researchers from the University of Copenhagen’s Department of Geosciences and Natural Resource Management and Department of Computer Science, in collaboration with the American space agency NASA, have pioneered a method that makes it possible to count the number of trees across vast swaths of land and calculate how much carbon is sequestered within each tree.
The study has just been published on the cover of the scientific journal, Nature. The method allowed the researchers to count 9.9 billion trees and measure how much carbon is stored in the semiarid Sahel, a belt of land stretching across Northern Africa, from the Atlantic to the Red Sea. The region covers roughly 10 million square kilometers.
Read more at University of Copenhagen - Faculty of Science
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