Speaker Bio & Abstract

 
Dr. Subhash Ashutosh Director General
Forest Survey of India
India

BiographyPossess over 20 years of experience in Remote Sensing & GIS Applications in Forestry. Served in Government of Meghalaya in different capacities in the Forest Department and held the position of PCCF till recently. Specialized in the field of Remote sensing and GIS applications in forest management in the last 20 years and has served two deputation tenures at Forest Survey of India (FSI) as Deputy Director and Joint Director. Steered nation-wide biennial forest cover mapping along with several National and International projects.AbstractForest Reference Level (FRL) signifies benchmark of green house gas emission level from forests of a country or any region. FRL is an essential requisite for assessing performance in implementing REDD+ activities. There are prescribed methodologies given in different source books (GOFC GOLD, 2016) for constructing reference level of a country which basically flow from the IPCC Good Practices Guidance (2003) and IPCC Guidelines (2006). There are two broad paradigms for assessment of forest carbon or constructing FRL viz ‘stock difference’ method and ‘gain-loss’ method. Forest Survey of India has submitted FRL to UNFCCC based on stock difference approach in the year 2018 which is already uploaded on the website of UNFCCC. The stock difference approach has limitations of not providing flux information in terms of emissions and removals from patches of change of forest cover (including changes in canopy density). Gain-loss approach overcomes this limitation. Analysis of change polygons from the forest cover mapping in geo-spatial domain and multiplying the activity data in different strata with the corresponding emission/removal factors gives the emission/removal of GHG from each change patch (activity data). Aggregation of emission/removal from all the change polygons using GIS for each sub national entity provides emission/removal estimate of GHG for each sub national entity. Aggregation of estimates of sub-national entities leads to the national level estimate. Since FSI has biennial time series of forest cover maps of the whole country along with the change maps. A trend of net GHG emission/removal over a period of past 8 to 10 years can be drawn with this approach and the trend line so obtained becomes the main basis of forest reference level. The method leads to construction of reference level of each sub national entity also.

The paper presents an attempt to construct forest reference level of India and all its provinces and Union Territories following the gain-loss method which has been described in short above.