Estimating CO2 emissions and opportunity costs of avoided deforestation:

Web-based GIS to support policy and program development for the Amazon

Ernesto Giron - GIS ConsultantElizabeth Barona - CIATGlenn G. Hyman - CIAT

Jan Borner - CIAT

AAG Annual Meeting 2010Washington, DC

AgendaAgenda

• Introduction• Background and context• Key features• Materials and methods• Simple scenario involving several queries• User experience considerations• Challenges• Difficulties• What’s next• Short sample video and Q&A

IntroductionIntroduction

• Growing interest in payment for environmental services (PES)

• Range of options, opportunities and possibilities not widely known.

• Where is deforestation likely to occur in the future? Where might a project to be successful?

• An online tool to investigate deforestation and the economics of reducing it in the Amazon.

Background and ContextBackground and Context

• Activity of project: "Strengthening the Amazon Initiative Consortium for Sustainable Use of Natural Resources“

• An instrument for regional inter-institutional collaboration aimed at development and implementation of studies and practices suited to strengthen conservation and rational use of natural resources in the Amazon

Key featuresKey features

• Satellite imagery and geographic information on population density, biodiversity, biomass, land cover and sustainable development in the Amazon

• Calculates rates of past and future forest loss

• Estimates opportunity cost of Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation (REDD) in user-defined areas

Material and methodsMaterial and methods• Hardware: servers and networks

• Software: ArcGIS Server, DOJO, REST

• Data: remote sensing and GIS

• Methods: satellite image interpretation, spatial overlay (zonal operators), calculation of deforestation rates and economic opportunity costs

• Human resources: server administrator, GIS specialist, developer, geographer, economist

Data Table and Sources

Title of dataset DescriptionFormat

(Vector o raster)

Resolution Source

Indigenous Territories

Indigenous areas from Bolivia, Brazil, Colombia and Peru

ShapefileOTCA (Organizacion del tratado de cooperacion Amazónica)

Protected Areas

Reserves and protected areas from Bolivia, Brazil, Colombia, Ecuador, Guyana, Peru, Suriname and Venezuela

ShapefileOTCA (Organizacion del tratado de cooperacion Amazónica)

Population Distribution of human population from 2000

grid 1 km

Gridded Population of the world, version 3 (GPW3) produced by the Center for International Earth Science Information Network (CIESIN) of the Earth Institute at Columbia University.

Future deforestation

Annual future deforestation, based on eight scenarios encompassing 50 annual time steps starting in 2001 (the baseline scenario, referred to as "business-as-usual" considers the deforestation trends across the basin.

grid 1 kmSoares-Filho, B.S. Amazon conservation scenarios

Data Table and Sources (Cont.)

Title of dataset DescriptionFormat

(Vector o raster)

Resolution

Source

Biomass Spatial distribution of forest biomass in the Amazon basin

grid 1 km

Saatchi S.S.; Houghton A., Dos Santos Alvala R.C., Soares J.V. and Yu Y. 2007. Distribution of aboveground live biomass in the Amazon basin. Global Change Biology (13), 813-837.

Land cover

Land cover map is based on 22 global land use defined within the UN Land cover classification system, for the period from December 2004 to June 2006.

grid300

meters

GlobCover Land version 2 developed as part of the GlobCover Project, a European Space Agency (ESA) initiative in partnership with JRC, EEA, FAO, UNEP, GOFC-GOLD and IGBP.

Accessibility

Travel distance by land or water (from less than an hour to 10 days) from any location to nearest city of 50,000 people or more

grid 1 km

CIAT/TNC (Development AML script to calculate accessibility in South America. It consists of 3 general processes: a) Estimate travel times on land and transportation surfaces b) Reduce travel times where slope and elevation are obstacles to travel and c) Calculate the "cost distance" between any point on the surface and all target cities)

Graphical User Interface Design Goals

o Effective cartographyo Multi-scaleo Fasto Informativeo Easy to useo Meet users expectation

Simple scenarios involving several Simple scenarios involving several queriesqueries

• Query Deforestation• Query Biomass• Query Land Cover• Query Population• Estimate Opportunity Cost

20012005201020152020202520302035204020452050

Query Deforestation Example

Deforestation projections

Department 2010 deforested (‘000 ha)

2010 forested (‘000 ha)

2030 deforested (‘000

ha)

2030forested(‘000 ha)

Loreto 8.2 329.5 11.6 326.1

Ucayali 6.6 93.7 9.9 90.4

Madre de Dios

4.8 76.9 15.2 66.4

Total 19.6 500.1 36.7 482.9

2010: 4% of Peruvian Amazon deforested2030:  8 % de Peruvian Amazon deforested (projected)Source: Soares et al., 2006

BETA VERSION

Query Biomass Example

$0,00

$0,50

$1,00

$1,50

$2,00

$2,50

$3,00

Opp-Cost by tonne of CO2 ($)

Opp-Cost by tonne of CO2 ($)

Opportunity cost estimates

Spatial ServicesSpatial ServicesSERVICE NAME URL

Base maphttp://gismap.ciat.cgiar.org/ArcGISServer/services/IA/CBase/MapServer/WMSServer

Indigenous Territorieshttp://gismap.ciat.cgiar.org/ArcGISServer/services/IA/IndigenousTerritories/MapServer/WMSServer

Protected Areashttp://gismap.ciat.cgiar.org/ArcGISServer/services/IA/ProtectedAreas/MapServer/WMSServer

Land Use/Coverhttp://gismap.ciat.cgiar.org/ArcGISServer/services/IA/LandCover/MapServer/WMSServer

Population http://gismap.ciat.cgiar.org/ArcGISServer/services/IA/Population/MapServer/WMSServer

Future Deforestationhttp://gismap.ciat.cgiar.org/ArcGISServer/services/IA/FutureDeforestation/MapServer/WMSServer

Biomasshttp://gismap.ciat.cgiar.org/ArcGISServer/services/IA/Biomass/MapServer/WMSServer

Accessibilityhttp://gismap.ciat.cgiar.org/ArcGISServer/services/IA/Accessibility/MapServer/WMSServer

Consuming Spatial Services: ExamplesConsuming Spatial Services: Examples

• WFS/WMSWFS/WMS

• RESTfulRESTful

• Geo-processing Geo-processing

ServicesServices

User experienceUser experience

• Users rarely read the documentation

• Users enjoy the tool at first, but their use is not sustained.

• Use limited by need to acquire specific data

• YouTube videos appear to be helpful for users

User polygon tracksUser polygon tracks

•Users draw random polygons to test application.Users draw random polygons to test application.

•Users draw outside the study area, eg. Panama, Users draw outside the study area, eg. Panama, Africa, even over the sea.Africa, even over the sea.

Users Statistics by Module Users Statistics by Module (15/03/10 – 31/03/10)(15/03/10 – 31/03/10)

What are some user needsWhat are some user needs

• Download underlying data sets

• Know more details on the base map and data layers

• Visualize other layers such as soils, precipitation, updated satellite images, among others

• Query by Biodiversity

• Import a predetermined shapefiles of an area of study

• Display current and future distribution of endemic and threatened species

• Access Portuguese version and video tutorials for each tool or module

Developer experience

• Key objective is to make it simple

• Opportunities for improvement come from working with just a few interested users

• The details are all important

• A lot of alphanumeric and geospatial information to show the users in a reduced space

Challenges

• Deal with regional to local scales to represent the real deforestation

• Continuous generation of cache maps and techniques to speed up the results at different scales

• Deal with several geographic and design tools to distribute an effective web-mapping application

DifficultiesDifficulties

• Consistency between browsers is difficult to achieve

• Many people in the Amazon still do not have sufficient bandwidth to use these types of tools

• Speed of application remains a concern: Flash is one possible solution

What’s nextWhat’s next

• More easy to use tools to estimate the More easy to use tools to estimate the deforestation and/or degradation baseline for deforestation and/or degradation baseline for REDDREDD

• Query by biodiversityQuery by biodiversity

• Import user-polygon or draw by coordinates of Import user-polygon or draw by coordinates of study area study area

• Open user-polygon in Google Maps/EarthOpen user-polygon in Google Maps/Earth

• Include results of deforestation probabilityInclude results of deforestation probability

• Print option and export to several formatsPrint option and export to several formats

• The system becomes more accurate as time The system becomes more accurate as time goes ongoes on

Thank you for your attention

Q&A

http://www.iamazonica.org.br/IAViewer