Subscriptions to satellite alerts linked to decreased deforestation in Africa
IMAGE: THE RESEARCH COVERED 22 TROPICAL COUNTRIES, OUTLINED IN ORANGE, ACROSS SOUTH AMERICA, AFRICA AND ASIA. FOREST COVER IN 2010 IS INDICATED IN GREEN. view more
CREDIT: FANNY MOFFETTE / UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN-MADISON
MADISON, Wis. -- Deforestation dropped by 18 percent in two years in African countries where organizations subscribed to receive warnings from a new service using satellites to detect decreases in forest cover in the tropics.
The carbon emissions avoided by reducing deforestation were worth between $149 million and $696 million, based on the ability of lower emissions to reduce the detrimental economic consequences of climate change.
Those findings come from new research into the effect of GLAD, the Global Land Analysis and Discovery system, available on the free and interactive interface Global Forest Watch. Launched in 2016, GLAD provides frequent, high-resolution alerts when it detects a drop in forest cover. Governments and others interested in halting deforestation can subscribe to the alerts on Global Forest Watch and then intervene to limit forest loss.
The research was led by Fanny Moffette, a postdoctoral researcher in applied economics in the Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies and the Department of Agricultural and Applied Economics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Moffette collaborated with Jennifer Alix-Garcia at Oregon State University, Katherine Shea at the World Resources Institute and Amy Pickens at the University of Maryland.
The researchers published their findings Jan. 4 in Nature Climate Change. They studied deforestation in 22 tropical countries across South America, Africa and Asia from 2011 to 2018.
Moffette and her co-authors set out to understand whether these kinds of automated alerts could achieve their goal of reducing forest loss, which has global climate implications. Land-use changes like deforestation account for 6 percent to 17 percent of global carbon emissions. And avoiding deforestation is several times more effective at reducing carbon emissions than regrowing forests.
"The first question was to look at whether there was any impact from having access to this free alert system. Then we were looking at the effect of users subscribing to this data to receive alerts for a specific area," says Moffette.
Simply being covered by GLAD did not help a country combat deforestation. Only those African countries in which organizations had actually subscribed to receive alerts saw a decrease in deforestation. Intuitively, this finding makes sense, says Moffette. Having access to information is good. But what you need to change the course of deforestation are people committed to using that information and acting.
However, deforestation did not decrease in South American or Asian countries, even where organizations subscribed to receive warnings. There are multiple potential causes for this continental discrepancy.
"We think that we see an effect mainly in Africa due to two main reasons," says Moffette. "One is because GLAD added more to efforts in Africa than on other continents, in the sense that there was already some evidence of countries using monitoring systems in countries like Indonesia and Peru. And Colombia and Venezuela, which are a large part of our sample, had significant political unrest during this period."
The GLAD program is still young, and as more governments and organizations sign on to receive warnings, and decide how to intervene at sites of deforestation, the system's influence may grow.
Developed by a team at the University of Maryland that includes one of Moffette's collaborators, GLAD made several improvements over its predecessors. It has very high spatial resolution, roughly 900 square meters, which is orders of magnitude more precise than older tools. And it can provide alerts up to every eight days if the skies are cloud-free when satellites re-image a section of Earth. Users can define custom areas to monitor. They then receive weekly emails, available in six languages, that contain geographic coordinates of the alerts within the monitored areas.
Going forward, the team is looking to evaluate the effect of new features of the monitoring platform, such as data that can inform forest restoration, while supporting efforts of organizations that try to intervene to halt deforestation.
"Now that we know subscribers of alerts can have an effect on deforestation, there's potential ways in which our work can improve the training they receive and support their efforts," says Moffette.
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Alert system shows potential for reducing deforestation, mitigating climate change
CORVALLIS, Ore. - Forest loss declined 18% in African nations where a new satellite-based program provides free alerts when it detects deforestation activities.
A research collaboration that included Jennifer Alix-Garcia of Oregon State University found that the Global Land Analysis and Discovery System, known as GLAD, resulted in carbon sequestration benefits worth hundreds of millions of dollars in GLAD's first two years.
Findings were published today in Nature Climate Change.
The premise of GLAD is simple: Subscribe to the system, launch a free web application, receive email alerts when the GLAD algorithm detects deforestation going on and then take action to save forests.
GLAD, launched in 2016, delivers alerts created by the University of Maryland's Global Land Analysis and Discovery lab based on high-resolution satellite imaging from NASA's Landsat Science program. The information is made available to subscribers via the interactive web application, Global Forest Watch.
"Before GLAD, government agencies and other groups in the business of deforestation prevention had to lean on reports from volunteers or forest rangers," Alix-Garcia said. "Obviously the people making those reports can't be everywhere, which is a massive limitation for finding out about deforestation activity in time to prevent it."
Changes in land use make a huge difference in how much carbon dioxide reaches the atmosphere and warms the planet, said Alix-Garcia, an economist in OSU's College of Agricultural Sciences.
"Reforestation is good, but avoiding deforestation is way better - almost 10 times better in some instances," she said. "That's part of why cost-effective reduction of deforestation ought to be part of the foundation of global climate change mitigation strategies."
Deforestation, Alix-Garcia adds, is a key factor behind the 40% increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide since the dawn of the industrial age, which in turn is contributing heavily to a warming planet. According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the global average atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration in 2018 was 407.4 parts per million, higher than at any time in at least 800,000 years.
The annual rate of increase in atmospheric CO2 over the past six decades is roughly 100 times faster than increases resulting from natural causes, such as those that happened following the last ice age more than 10,000 years ago, according to NOAA.
Alix-Garcia, study leader Fanny Moffette of the University of Wisconsin and collaborators at the University of Maryland and the World Resources Institute looked at deforestation in 22 nations in the tropics in South America, Africa and Asia between 2011 and 2018 - the last five years before GLAD and first two years after.
In Africa, the results were telling: Compared to the prior five years, the first two years of GLAD showed 18% less forest loss where forest protectors were subscribing to the system.
Using a concept known as the social cost of carbon - the marginal cost to society of each additional metric ton of greenhouse gas that reaches the atmosphere - researchers estimate the alert system was worth between $149 million and $696 million in Africa those two years.
There was no substantial change in deforestation in Asia or South America, however, but possible explanations for that are numerous and suggest GLAD can make a greater difference in those places in years to come, the researchers say.
"We think that we see an effect mainly in Africa due to two main reasons," Moffette said. "One is because GLAD added more to efforts in Africa than on other continents, in the sense that there was already some evidence of countries using monitoring systems in countries like Indonesia and Peru. And Colombia and Venezuela, which are a large part of our sample, had significant political unrest during this period."
The GLAD program is still young and as more groups sign up to receive alerts and decide how to intervene in deforestation, the system's influence may grow, she added.
"Now that we know subscribers of alerts can have an effect on deforestation, there are ways in which our work can potentially improve the training the subscribers receive and support their efforts," Moffette said.
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