Climatic suitability analysis of fast growing tree species under wastelands of Uttarakhand for carbon credit

Abstract

The Kyoto Protocol provides explicit opportunities for Annex B countries to partly achieve their reduction commitments by planting new forests, or by managing existing forests or agricultural land differently (so-called Land-Use, Land-Use Change and Forestry measures: LULUCF). The presumption of these LULUCF options is that removing CO2 from the atmosphere and to the stabilization of the atmospheric CO2 concentration to be used by the new forests as a mitigation strategy. The degraded areas have a large potential to sequester carbon in the soil; storage in vegetation is preferable due to their longer residual time and less risk of rapid release to the atmosphere. The main aim of this study was to identify the suitable land area of wastelands for plantation of fast growing tree species through Remote Sensing (RS) and Geographic Information System (GIS). A suitability resulting from the overlay process of the identified theme layers has unique information of tree requirement on which the suitability is based. The identified theme layers include temperature (maximum, minimum and average temperature), precipitation and soil properties. Those thematic layers with their associated attribute data were encoded in GIS database. Overlay operation was performed on those layers as the suitability model assigned. The digital layers were reclassified and given weightings to be analysed further. Finally, suitability map was prepared with five suitability categories namely, most suitable, suitable, moderately suitable, less suitable and not suitable. After developing a suitability map combined to each map with some logical equations and unique number was given to each tree species in GIS and it is to come up with a final suitability map. The final map represented the suitability classes for each species delineated as suitable, moderately suitable, less suitable and unsuitable. According to the final suitability map, Poplar, Eucalyptus and Pine should be grown on 631730 ha 123290 ha and 529810 ha area and the potential of carbon credit would be 89.5 M Euro, 11.1 M Euro and 209.8 M Euro, respectively. Acacia catechu could not find the place because of its low potential of annual carbon sequestration compared to other species. It can be concluded that Uttarakhand has a lot of potential for carbon sequestration and credits, through utilization of wasteland using fast growing tree species.