固碳林业与碳贸易.DOC

PAGE PAGE 1 CARBON FORESTRY AND CARBON TRADING Shirong Liu Member, Vice President, China Academy Abstract: Forest is the main component of terrestrial ecosystems, it absorbs and sequestrates large quantity of CO2 in the air, serving as a huge carbon sink. Global forest carbon storage accounts for 77% of the total terrestrial vegetation, while carbon storage in forest soil makes up for 39% of the global soils. However, deforestation, without doubt will increase green house gas emission such as CO2 etc, and thus it has become the second main CO2 emission source closely after fossil fuel burning. In this sense, forest ecosystem has played an important and irreplaceable role in global carbon cycle and carbon emission and sequestration To mitigate the ever aggravated global climate change, forestry is now undertaking a developing transition and conversion. Seen from an international view, carbon forestry has taken a new rise. Carbon forestry covers the following four aspects: 1) to promote those forest activities which will enhance the capacity of carbon sink, such as: afforestation, reforestation, ecological restoration, and setting up Agro-forestry compound system so as to increase the carbon store in terrestrial vegetation and soil; 2) to conserve and sustain forest carbon pool, namely to protect the carbon store already sequestrated in the existing forest eco-system and restrict and reduce carbon emission; 3) to take a series of measures of carbon management through sustainable forest management process to reduce disturbance to soil while increase tree growth, and therefore carbon emission from forest management is decreased while carbon sink is enhanced; 4) to implement carbon replacement action, use durable forest timber products to replace energy-intensive materials, utilizing the renewable wood fuel (such as bio-diesel and lignose-cellulose transformed ethanol) and recycled logging residues for fuel. Kyoto Protocol, reached in 1997 for the purpose of mitiga