Climate change: these two little words describe one of the biggest challenges of our time. The solutions to this multi-faceted problem, which has been building since the industrial revolution, tend toward controversy. Take cap-and-trade, a concept that has received much media attention lately. Given the state of the global economy, assigning a dollar value to greenhouse gas emissions has lawmakers and business leaders up in arms.

But there’s another side to the issue, one that holds a lot of promise to the remote sensing industry: protecting the world’s forests. Since forests absorb CO2, one of the biggest greenhouse gas pollutants, the health of these “natural filters” is of utmost importance. The United Nations and other groups have proposed incentive-based programs to reduce deforestation across the globe. Biomass estimations and carbon accounting will be a critical function of any such effort.

Until now, much of the work in this regard has relied on ground-based methods with only a few studies based on low-resolution satellite data. As reported in the current issue of PE&RS, there is a move toward high-resolution satellite and airborne techniques for improved carbon accounting accuracy and efficiency. The article, written by Fugro EarthData’s Dr. Mark Williams and Jake Jenkins, documents the pros and cons of several remote sensing methodologies, including the potential role of dual-band IFSAR for carbon accounting.

Tags: biomass, Carbon accounting, CO2, GeoSAR

This entry was posted on Thursday, July 9th, 2009 at 1:10 pm and is filed under Carbon accounting. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.