Australia carbon monitoring technology and forest for developing countries

February 18, 2008
AUSTRALIAN technology for measuring carbon emissions from diminishing forests is to be made available to developing countries in cooperation with a group created by former US president Bill Clinton.The Clinton Climate Initiative has selected the CSIRO-developed National Carbon Accounting System (NCAS) as the platform for a global rollout, Climate Change Minister Penny Wong said today.

The global system would assist in recognising sustainable forest management and reforestation and would be adapted to meet the individual needs of developing nations, Senator Wong said. "An internationally-accepted carbon monitoring and accounting system is critical to integrating forests into the global carbon markets," she told the launch of the partnership in Canberra. "This can play an important role to alleviate poverty in developing countries through encouraging and providing a mechanism to reward sustainable management."

About 20 per cent of global emissions come from deforestation and forest degradation.

The NCAS uses remote sensing, satellite images, greenhouse-gas accounting methods and modelling of environmental changes to monitor and account for emissions from land-based sectors.

Clinton Climate Initiative representative Ira Magaziner said the organisation and the Australian government had agreed to make the world-leading technology freely available. "Not to try to wall it off or get commercial gain from it, because this is a public good - something that the world needs, that we all need," Mr Magaziner told the function. "We hope over the next few years to deploy systems around the world that will begin that process and capture that CO2 and that carbon in the air that we need to capture."