From Research to Impacts on Lives: Carbon Cycle Science in U.S. Foreign Assistance Development Programs
Abstract
When designed and implemented successfully, sustainable landscapes (SL) programs implemented by the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) should reduce land-based greenhouse gas emissions while achieving fundamental development objectives such as economic growth of impoverished and disadvantaged populations. Two sets of questions link these programs to carbon cycle science.
- First, over the past ten years, the design objectives for SL programs have raised a number of research questions some of which U.S. technical agencies such as NASA, the US Geological Survey, and the U.S. Forest Service have addressed. These include: (1) To what degree does forest degradation influence soil carbon stocks, compared with deforestation? (2) What carbon benefits do mangrove and peatland protection and restoration deliver, particularly in the tropics? The science in both cases has advanced considerably over the past decade, attributable in large part to research by U.S. technical agencies. The extent to which different investments in carbon protection or sequestration are vulnerable to loss remains unknown in many cases, and assessments of how these risks are changing over time remains similarly challenging. - Second, to what extent has carbon cycle science informed elements of development programs such as program design and monitoring? Several bilateral development programs illustrate the types of carbon cycle and land use analysis that could be useful, as well as the conditions that facilitate or impede active uptake of available science in service of development and land-based emission reductions.- Publication:
-
AGU Fall Meeting Abstracts
- Pub Date:
- December 2018
- Bibcode:
- 2018AGUFM.B23M2705G
- Keywords:
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- 3305 Climate change and variability;
- ATMOSPHERIC PROCESSESDE: 0414 Biogeochemical cycles;
- processes;
- and modeling;
- BIOGEOSCIENCESDE: 4806 Carbon cycling;
- OCEANOGRAPHY: BIOLOGICAL AND CHEMICALDE: 6309 Decision making under uncertainty;
- POLICY SCIENCES