For New Mandala readers keen to learn more about carbon trading and its relationship to logging in Burma, the Australian government’s National Carbon Accounting System website provides a wealth of detailed information. It can, among other things, give you an idea of how carbon accounting calculations can be made, based largely on analysing “land-based sources and sinks”. It shows how some governments are beginning to conceive their place in the global carbon economy. This Australian system, with its national-level modeling, is some years in front of what I imagine is possible for Burma. I don’t think that such detailed modeling has even yet been attempted for the Burmese case.
Who will be the first to try?
This could be a really exciting project for an environmental economist or ecologist looking for a new challenge. Actually trying to quantify the implications (both local and global) of, say, “avoided deforestation” in Burma would be a huge task. If we want to really understand how a country like Burma fits in the global scheme then something like the Australian carbon accounting framework might need to be implemented. Is anybody prepared to take up that challenge? Is this the point at which the idea of paying for “avoided deforestation” in Burma completely, and finally, runs out of steam?
Thanks to Pat for pointing out this important resource and for encouraging me to highlight Australian efforts to provide better tools for carbon accounting.
2 responses so far ↓
1 aiontay // Nov 9, 2006 at 2:14 pm
I haven’t read all of Austrialia’s carbon accounting framework, but it is based on satellite imagery, which presents a serious problem in using it as a model for Burma. The thing is, you need to “groundtruth” your imagery. You have to check a part of the area covered by the image to see if what you think you are seeing is in fact what you are seeing. In other words, if you say you are seeing teak forest, you need to visit part of the area and see if it really is teak, and not some other hardwood, or bamboo.
What are the chances that the Burmese regime would allow access to the country to calibrate the imagery with what is there on the ground?
2 New Mandala » Rhett Butler on “avoided deforestation” in Burma // Nov 11, 2006 at 3:38 am
[...] Rhett Butler – the creator of mongabay.com, a rainforest website, and author of the article that originally prompted me to pose some questions about the idea of “avoided deforestation” in the Burmese scene – has written me a short note which he is happy for me to post to New Mandala. [...]
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