Carbon stocks monitoring in Nunukan, East Kalimantan: a spatial and modelling aproach. Report from carbon monitoring team of the forest resources management for carbon sequestration (FORMACS) project

In the last two decades climate change has become a prominent issue for the global community. During the last century the mean temperature of the earth has increased by 0.6 ºC and the rate of change appears to increase. An increase of the atmospheric concentration of the greenhouse gases (GHG), carbon dioxide (CO2), methane (CH4) and nitrous oxide (N2O) are identified as the main factor causing global warming. During the last decade net CO2 emission doubled from 1400 million Mg year-1 to 2900 million Mg year -1 . Meanwhile, the CO 2 concentration in the atmosphere in 1998 was 360 ppmv, up from a value of 280 ppmv a century earlier, with a yearly increment of 1.5 ppmv(Houghton et al ., 2001). The elevated CO2 concentration in the atmosphere is largely caused by human activities, particularly land use change and use of fossil fuel for transport, power generation and industrial activities. Accumulatively, the use of fossil fuel and forest conversion to other land use have both been responsible for about half of the human-induced CO2 emission to the atmosphere, but the current impact is in a ratio of 3:1. Burning fossil fuel means returning carbon to the atmosphere that was fixed by plants in the geological past. Forest conversion and land use change imply that carbon stored as plant biomass or in (peat) soils is released to the atmosphere through burning ('slash and burn') or decomposition of organic matter above and below ground. Logging removes stored carbon from the landscape, often resulting in rapid return to the atmosphere, depending on the use of wood. It is estimated that between 1990 - 1999, land use change has contributed around 1.7 G year -1 to total CO2 emission (Watson et al ., 2000).

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