Around the World with Earthwatch: Taking Stock of Carbon in Five Forests

The HSBC Climate Partnership is a five-year programme on climate change to inspire action by individuals, businesses and governments. In 2007, the five partners, HSBC, Earthwatch, The Climate Group, The Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute and WWF, began work to create cleaner, greener cities, protect some of the world's major rivers, conduct the largest ever field experiment on the effects of climate change on the world's forests, and create 'climate champions' worldwide who will undertake research and bring back valuable knowledge and experience to their workplace and communities.

The aim of the Earthwatch research programme is to quantify how human disturbances, such as logging, and climatic impacts interact to affect forest diversity and carbon cycling. Billions of people rely on forests for food, shelter, fuel, clean air, fresh water and other ecosystem services. Forests also play a vital role in climate change because they influence weather patterns, and trees capture and store carbon. However, climate change will affect the growth of trees and this process is poorly understood by scientists.

Regional Climate Centres (RCCs) have been set up in China, India, Latin America, North America and Europe, where scientists, supported by local community members and HSBC employees, carry out field work to establish the condition of the forests. The use of volunteers from HSBC bank to help monitor forests is a unique feature of this programme. Results from this programme will enable forest managers, conservationists, and communities to understand how forests are responding to climate change and how they can better manage them.

Networks of plots are established at each RCC, selected to represent forest areas with a gradient of human disturbance. The nature of the disturbance is specific to each area, reflecting past human activity in the region. For example, in Brazil the plots follow a gradient of selective logging (initial, intermediate, advanced) within primary (untouched forest), whereas in the UK the plots are in secondary forest fragments of different sizes. Every tree larger than 5 cm diameter within each plot is being monitored over time, to record growth, mortality, and recruitment. These changes are then used to estimate changes in forest carbon storage, and how different tree species respond to habitat disturbance and climatic effects. Over time, a long-term picture of forest change will develop. This presentation will summarize early findings from the research programme, and also discuss the use of volunteers for this type of research.