Developing National Carbon Accounting and Monitoring System for India's Forest - an Ecosystem Model Approach

The Kyoto protocol has made carbon a tradable commodity which signifies the value of forest carbon budgets and the need for understanding factors influencing them. For measuring future consequences of changes in land usage, current level of carbon emission and future pattern needs scientific evaluation, if forest based climate mitigation strategy is to be developed. Developing more consistent, accurate estimates of forest carbon stocks and quantification of pools and fluxes related to the forest carbon cycle are important in this context. The advantage of improved estimation of forest phytomass, soil organic carbon, by way of spatial interpretation of stock through remote sensing for modeling the carbon flux of Indian forests on account of land use and vegetation cover changes is explained in this article.