A consensus has been reached by two groups of scientists who this year published differing estimates of global carbon emissions from deforestation.
Presenting at Forest Day during the recent UN climate change talks in Doha, a group from the Woods Hole Research Center and one from Winrock International said they concurred that carbon emissions from tropical deforestation worldwide between 2000 and 2005 were 3 gigatons per year.
Daniel Zarin from the Climate and Land Use Alliance said “Science is going to inform policy making one way or another, it’s either going to create confusion or it’s going to create clarity. And in this space around the climate change negotiations, our experience is that when there’s confusion about the science, it’s an excuse for doing nothing.”
So the Climate and Land Use Alliance, together with Norway’s International Climate and Forest Initiative convinced the two groups to meet and try to reach a consensus.
“We wanted them to really talk about what their methodologies were, what the scope of their analyses were and to start to explore why they had such substantial differences in their results,” Zarin said.