Mitigation Analysis

Mitigation Options Analysis

A mitigation options analysis in the forest sector will basically need to estimate how much carbon can be stored in vegetation and soil within a time period and a given management practice and site characteristics, the option implementation costs, the land area where a given option could be developed, and the lifetimes of harvested biomass (IPCC/WGII, SAR, 1995). Also, a key element to be considered is the type of sustainable forest practice that could be adopted in a given a country in order to mitigate carbon emissions.

In this study, the mitigation analysis for the forest sector deals with the options that have been traditionally considered priority government programs to manage, enhance and protect the country«s forest resources. These options are: natural forest protection and management, establishment of industrial and small-scale plantations, and development of agroforestry systems. Forest protection and conservation in the country have been implemented for different purposes, such as biodiversity conservation, soil and watershed protection, recreational activities, and sustainable timber production. These protected areas include, among others, national parks, forest reserves, and biosphere reserves.

In the development of the baseline and mitigation scenarios, the most important challenge was the assessment of current and future land use patterns to determine the amount of lands that will have forest use (including native and planted forests), during the study period. The determination of the forest land area was then based on assessing the evolution of deforestation in the country under different simplified assumptions. Thus both land use trends if only current forest policies are actually implemented and additional programs to further reduce deforestation rates were analyzed in order to develop the baseline and mitigation scenarios, respectively.

The mitigation assessment was based on the following steps: i) construction of a baseline scenario to determine possible trends of carbon emissions from forest clearing; ii) assessment of carbon storage in pilot forestry projects and associated costs; iii) construction of mitigation scenarios to assess Venezuela«s potential for storing carbon, based on the forest practices analyzed in the case studies; and v) identification of main mitigation policies and barriers for options implementation.

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