FAOSTAT estimates of greenhouse gas emissions from biomass and peat fires

Abstract

The Global Fire Emissions Database (GFED3) and the FAOSTAT Emissions database, containing estimates of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions from biomass burning and peat fires, are compared. The two datasets formed the basis for several analyses in the fifth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC AR5), and thus represent a critical source of information for emissions inventories at national, regional and global level. The two databases differ in their level of computational complexity in estimating emissions. While both use the same burned area information from remote sensing, estimates of available biomass are computed in GFED3 at tier 3 using a complex dynamic vegetation model, while they are computed in FAOSTAT using default, tier 1 parameters from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Over the analysis period 1997-2011, the two methods were found to produce very similar global GHG emissions estimates for each of the five GFED aggregated biomass fire classes: i) Savanna; ii) Woodland; iii) Forest; iv) Deforestation; v) Peatlands; with total emissions ranging 6-8 Gt CO2eq yr -1 . The main differences between the two datasets were found with respect to peat fires, with FAOSTAT showing a lower 1997-1998 peak in emissions compared with GFED3, within an otherwise good agreement for the rest of the study period, when limited to the three tropical countries covered by GFED. Conversely, FAOSTAT global emissions from peat fires, including both boreal and tropical regions, were several times larger than those currently estimated by GFED3. Results Climatic Change (2016) 135:699-711

New estimates of greenhouse gas emissions from biomass burning and peat fires using MODIS Collection 6 burned areas

“…Following the previously published FAOSTAT methodology (Rossi et al 2016), C6 monthly burned areas tiles were converted into yearly burned areas tiles (summing up the twelve monthly files), and then mosaicked globally by UMD land cover class.…”

“…More precisely, the five UMD land cover classes representing forests (class 1: evergreen needleleaf; class 2: evergreen broadleaf; class 3: deciduous needleleaf; class 4: deciduous broadleaf; class 5: mixed forests) were aggregated to form the three forestbased classes boreal, temperate, and tropical to allow for calculation of the emissions and then further aggregated as "humid tropical forest" and "other forest" for comparison with GFED4s (Rossi et al 2016).…”

“…This study calculates all emission estimates from C6 burned areas using the fuel biomass consumption values and emission factors derived from the IPCC 2006, following the same methods presented in Rossi et al (2016). As in Rossi et al (2016), the aggregated land cover classes described above in Section 2.2 were combined with the Joint Research Centre (JRC) climate map to locate spatially fuel biomass values and emission factors by vegetation type and climate zones; in the present study, the climate map was resampled at 500 m ground resolution rather than at the 0.25°resolution previously used.…”

“…As part of this process, FAO disseminates yearly updates of national level emission/removal estimates for the Agriculture Forestry and Other Land Use (AFOLU) sector in FAOSTAT (see, e.g., http://www.fao.org/faostat/en/#data/GH and http://www.fao.org/faostat/en/#data/GI), following a Tier 1 methodology and approach 1 of land representation of the IPCC 2006 guidelines (Tubiello et al 2013;Tubiello et al 2014;Tubiello et al 2019). Previous work (Rossi et al 2016) demonstrated that the Tier 1 FAOSTAT GHG fire emissions estimates are comparable, globally and regionally, to Tier 3 estimates by GFED.…”

“…This MODIS product supersedes the previous version of the MODIS burned area product (MCD64A1 Collection 5.1, C5.1 in short). Both GEFD4 and previous FAOSTAT dataset were based on the MODIS C5.1 and both GFED and FAOSTAT fire emissions data underpinned relevant sections of the IPCC fifth Assessment Report (AR5) (Ciais et al 2013), thus representing a critical source of information for regional and global level GHG estimates (Rossi et al 2016). The present study aims at updating the FAOSTAT emissions as well as to compare the updated product to the most recent GFED emissions database (GFED4s) (van der Werf et al 2017), helping countries to understand the differences between new and previous global greenhouse gas emission estimates products and therefore supporting efforts for transparent reporting under the Climate Convention.…”