Forest Carbon Sinks – Concepts and Major Trends.docVIP

Forest Carbon Sinks – Concepts and Major Trends Background and basic concepts Carbon is held in a variety of different carbon stocks on this planet, including oceans, fossil fuel deposits, the terrestrial system, and the atmosphere. In the terrestrial system, forests play the most important role in the course of taking up or sequestering carbon, since it is suggested that about two-thirds of the globe’s terrestrial carbon is sequestered in the standing forests, forest under story plants, leaf and forest debris, and in forest soils. A carbon stock is usually called a “carbon sink” if more carbon is flowing into it than out of it during a given period of time; on the opposite, if more carbon is flowing out of a carbon stock than into it, such carbon stock is called a “source”. While some environment organizations have demonstrated that it is uncertain that a specific forest can be deemed a carbon sink rather than a carbon source, the importance of forests in the global carbon cycle, as well as the aggregate contribution made by them to the control on the emission of greenhouse gases (“GHG”) has been undisputable. In addition, it is widely accepted since 1990s that growing trees to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere would be less expensive than developing and implementing technologies to decrease the emissions of existing industries, such as switching to alternative fuels for energy production or the use of scrubber-type cleaning technologies. This has provided an important motive for the use of forest carbon sinks in fulfilling either public policies or commercial purposes. Kyoto Protocol Against the background mentioned above, the Kyoto Protocol, which is a protocol to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, went into force on 16 February 2005. The Kyoto Protocol establishes legally binding commitments for the reduction of six types of greenhouse gases produced by “Annex I” (industrialized) nations, as well as general commitm