Trees matter: Accounting for silvopastoral systems’ contributions to national GHG inventories

Suber M, Arango J, Torres CF, Rosenstock. 2020. Trees matter: Accounting for silvopastoral systems’ contributions to national GHG inventories. Cali, Colombia:CGIAR Research Program on Climate Change, Agriculture and Food Security (CCAFS).

The integration of trees in pasture lands have significant mitigation potential. However, this potential is currently constrained by logistical and political obstacles.

In LAC in particular, SPS remain largely undefined. This has inhibited the generation of consistent, coherent, transparent, and accurate activity data.

Consequently, the sequestration potential and specialization of SPS are poorly represented in national GHG inventories, and national AFOLU contributions toward NDC targets are underestimated or omitted entirely.

Data on ground-truthing activities would improve the completeness, accuracy, and comparability of reporting systems, thus enabling more accurate documentation of national progress toward commitments to the Paris Agreement.

Low-cost, high-quality tools for information generation, such as Collect Earth Online, are readily available. Countries such as Colombia, Panama, and Peru, have already acknowledged this excellent opportunity for SPS activity data generation.

A regional alignment to tackle the production of SPS activity data is possible, and a joint work committee among these three countries has been proposed for the development of technical guidelines to defining SPS and designing and accrediting Collect Earth surveys.