Kyoto lands are lands within the territory of Kyoto Protocol party nations on which vegetation is planted that acts to sequester carbon. These lands enable protocol parties to earn carbon offset credits to balance their continuing GHG emissions.

Forests and other types of vegetation that store or sequester carbons and are increasing in size are considered to be carbon sinks, or reservoirs. In the main, natural carbon sinks include trees, plants, and organisms that use photosynthesis to remove carbon dioxide (CO2) from the atmosphere by incorporating, or fixing, carbon into biomass as carbohydrates (CHOH)n and releasing oxygen (O2) into the air. Carbon sinks not only rid the atmosphere of greenhouse gases (GHGs) but also, by producing additional CO2-consuming biomass, can scavenge even more CO2 from the atmosphere.

The Kyoto Protocol, a United Nations treaty, aims to reduce anthropogenic GHG emissions (Bloomfield, 2000). It allows member countries to use carbon sinks as a form of carbon offset, gaining credit for their sinks against their continued GHG emissions. These so-called Kyoto lands may then be used to comply with emission-reduction requirements of the treaty.

According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), if GHG emissions continue to rise at their current rate, global warming will accelerate to levels that will increase both floods and droughts, raise sea levels, and obliterate thousands of plant and animal species. The use of carbon sinks to mitigate the effects of global warming may be useful to countries with large areas of forest or other vegetation for compliance with the Kyoto Protocol. Specific, legally binding quotas for reduction of GHG emissions have been established for the developed nations; developing countries are not compelled to restrict their GHG emissions, which may come, in large part, from land use such as cultivation of lands and destruction of forests.

For developed nations, land use would have little effect in meeting Kyoto quotas, since most of their land has already been cultivated. Developing countries may benefit from offsetting their GHG emissions with carbon sinks via land use or green projects, and can help developed countries meet their quotas by trading carbon credits. Usually, an industrialized country will purchase carbon credits from a developing country to meet its quota.

In implementing the Kyoto Protocol, parties to the treaty will most likely base their policy decisions on "definitions, accounting procedures . . . for carbon stocks, and changes in carbon stocks." Per the protocol, each party "must devise its own method of verifying its carbon emission reductions (CER) to account for carbon sequestration." In the clean development mechanism (CDM), only afforestation, "the establishment of forest on land that has been 'unforested' for a long period, decades to centuries," and reforestation, the conversion of 'nonforested' lands to forest, are allowable methods of producing CERs for the first period of the protocol, 2008 to 2012. Forest conservation or avoidance of deforestation, "the conversion of forest to nonforest," is ineligible.

The IPCC in its revised Guidelines for National GHG Inventories (1997) and the Kyoto Protocol itself call for a strict accounting of the carbon changes encompassing all carbon sinks within a given timeframe; they require that inclusion be limited to "land areas subject to direct human-induced activities (Kindermann, 2008)." GHG emissions and removals via land use, land-use change, and forestry (LULCF) may be designed to help parties to Annex B of the protocol meet their obligations. In this case, the Guidelines are to serve as the basis for "transparent and verifiable" reportage of changes in forestry and related GHG emissions.

Changes in land use can appreciably change the GHG emission levels, with deforestation increasing them and afforestation reducing them. Anthropogenic emissions of CO2 grew by 2.5 percent to record levels in 2006, as international efforts to fight global warming failed to curb the main gas blamed for rising temperatures. Burning fossil fuels and changing land use together produced 8.8 billion metric tons of CO2 in 2006. The inclusion of land use as part of the calculations for GHG emissions tends to focus on certain developing nations, notably Indonesia and Brazil, which are significantly raising their GHG emission rankings. Between 1950 and 2000, when land use is taken into account these rankings rose from eighteenth to fifth and from twenty-seventh to fourth, respectively. Indonesia and Brazil have both cleared large parcels of forest, converting carbon sinks into timber and agricultural land and thereby emitting GHGs.

References

1. Bloomfield, J., M. Ratchford, and S. Brown. "Land- Use Change and Forestry in the Kyoto Protocol." Mitigation and Adaptation Strategies for Global Change 5, no. 1 (March, 2000): 1381-2386.

2. Kindermann, G., et al. "Global Cost Estimates of Reducing Carbon Emissions Through Avoided Deforestation." PNAS 105 (2008): 10302-10307.

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