Integrated Modeling and Assessment of Climate Change Mitigation in North America: Lessons learned from Mexico

The Government of Mexico has recently designed a system of measurement, reporting and verification (MRV) to account for the emissions and removals of greenhouse gases (GHG) associated with the country's forest sector. This system reports national-scale GHG emissions based on the "stock-difference" approach combining information from two sets of measurements from the national forest inventory and remote sensing data. However, consistent with the commitments made by the country to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), the MRV system must strive to reduce, as far as practicable, the uncertainties associated with national estimates on GHG fluxes. Since 2012, the Mexican government through its National Forestry Commission, with support from the North America Commission of Environmental Cooperation, the Forest Services of Canada and USA, the SilvaCarbon Program and research institutes in Mexico, has made progress towards the use of carbon dynamics models ("gain-loss" approach) to reduce uncertainty of the GHG estimates in strategic landscapes. In Mexico, most of the forests are under social tenure where management includes a wide array of activities (e.g. selective harvesting, firewood collection). Altering these diverse management activities (REDD+ strategies as well as harvested wood products), can augment their mitigation potential. Here we present the main steps conducted to compile and integrate information from forest inventories, remote sensing, disturbance data and ecosystem carbon transfers to generate inputs required to calibrate these models and validate their outputs. The analyses are supported by the use of the CBM-CFS3 model with the appropriate modification of the model parameters and input data according to the 2006 guidelines of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) for preparing Tier 3-GHG inventories. The ultimate goal of this tri-national effort is to show how the data and tools developed for carbon assessment in strategic landscapes in North America can help estimate the impact of several mitigation options consistent with national goals of GHG emission reductions.