Blog: Reforestation and Carbon Offset efforts Monitoring


 Mitigating man-made climate change is one of the biggest challenges the global community is currently facing. To limit the atmospheric levels of greenhouse gas emissions (GHGs) in general, but of carbon dioxide (CO2) as the main contributor specifically, carbon sequestration has become vital, with reforestation being suggested as one of the core contributors. Consequently, countries have invested in planting many trees and protecting existing forests to mitigate climate change. Similarly, the United Nations has been at the forefront of promoting this idea by introducing the framework REDD+ (Reducing emissions from deforestation and forest degradation) to encourage climate change mitigation efforts through halting and reversing forest loss and degradation through the conservation, management and expansion of forests. While reforestation projects have proliferated in the past decade, monitoring efforts have not kept up similarly. Since it takes many years for a tree to be “net positive”, the survival rate is, among others, a key measure of reforestation success. However, measuring it reliably on a large scale proves challenging. This calls for new research in reforestation monitoring.  

    

Over the past couple of years, remote sensing has demonstrated its ability to monitor certain developments on the earth’s surface such as forest fires, melting glaciers the growth of cities, and many other aspects related both to people and the planet. The backbone of such work has been satellite imagery from projects such as ESA’s Sentinel-2 missions, providing a resolution of 10 m to 60m with a revisit rate of around five days and NASA’s Landsat mission with a 30-metre resolution. And many higher resolutions satellite imagery from providers such as Planet (https://www.planet.com/) with a 3m resolution have also been introduced. In our research lab we (ii) identify and map existing, eventually unmapped reforestation projects on a global scale, (ii) derive new approaches to monitor the progress of reforestation projects, and (iii) assess downstream the impact of reforestation projects on the environment. Through our research, we intend to inform society about the state of reforestation projects around the world and its environmental impact.

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