| Study & Research Center |
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Tropical Forests for Global Climate
As atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases, and in particular CO2, increase this will cause major changes in climate (IPCC-TAR; Houghton et al., 2001). For some regions of the world, this may ultimately lead, to ‘dangerous climate change’ (Pachauri, 2006; Schneider and Lane, 2006) and so stabilization scenarios are receiving increasing amounts of interest both politically and scientifically (Knutti et al., 2005; Matthews, 2005;Jones et al., 2006). The role of tropical forests in the global carbon (C) cycle has been debated over the past 20 years, with several estimates of its contribution to the increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide (Houghton et al., 1987; Detwiler and Hall, 1988). Today there is general agreement, based on land-use change data and atmospheric data, that the tropics are a net source of C to the atmosphere, in the range of 1.1 to 2.1 Pg C y-1 (Houghton, 1997). The primary cause of this net source is deforestation in the tropical zone, with Asia and Latin America accounting for over 80% of the flux (Houghton, 1997). The net CO2 flux is a result of land-use change and depends on how quickly land uses are converted, the biomass of the vegetation that is cleared, the fate of the carbon cleared, the biomass of new vegetation, the time course of the subsequent land-use systems, and the re-growth rates of vegetation. Much of the uncertainty in the values of CO2 flux from the tropics is a result of inadequate estimates for these parameters (Houghton, 1997). In particular, there is little information on the carbon sequestration potential of many land-use systems of the humid tropics (Houghton et al., 1993). Carbon sequestration capacity surrogate the forest growth and forest health and this is the primary attribute which determines whether forest could provide environmental services (local, regional and global) ie. buffering the climate change (Eamus et al., 2005). Hence understanding processes on carbon sequestration will provide fundamental for other environmental services. Ecosystem services of tropical forest post-human disturbances and under global warming/climate change, however, have drastically declined and have negative impacts on local, regional and global scale. In Indonesia, almost half of the total forested areas (more than 50 million Ha) have degraded. Combined factors of biophysical, political, economical and social causes have been identified as those forest degradation. As a result, a systematic effort which encompass multi-disciplinary approaches need to be proposed to restore these vast areas of tropical forests, highlighting importance of carbon-related issues. Hence, the objectives of this study centre were :
Based on relevancy and our staff expertise, we have identified the following areas for our future study :
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