Grant to study forests and carbon storage in China

Southern Cross University’s Centre for Regional Climate Change Studies has won a $400,000 grant to do forestry and carbon storage research in northern China.

The project - with the China National Forestry Economics and Development Research Centre (CNFEDRC) and Qinghai Forestry Bureau (QFB) - will establish a monitoring and evaluation methodology for forestry in Qinghai Province.

Qinghai Province is located in the northeast of the Qinghai-Tibet plateau and forms the upper catchment of the Yangtze, Yellow and Mekong River, often referred to as ‘China’s water tower’ because of the huge water resources it brings to the rest of China.

The Qinghai-Tibet plateau is sensitive to global warming and there has been significant change in recent years as glaciers in that region retreat and deliver less water to the rivers and the rest of China.

Climate change and human factors have resulted in the loss of water and soil, severe wind and sandstorm damage, degradation of grasslands, accelerating shrinkage of wetlands, and a decrease in biodiversity, said Dr Graham Jones, director of the Centre for Regional Climate Change Studies.

“Measures to mitigate the impact of climate change require capacity building in forestry as well as field experience in building carbon storage in trees and soils, and linking all this to Chinese agriculture,” he said.

“The Australian-Chinese team will try to develop mechanisms to return income to Chinese farmers and support ecological interventions and programs that change current practices and lead to policy changes.

“China is the world’s largest emitter of greenhouse gases and Chinese forestry organisations are now beginning to be very interested in implementing methods which calculate the amount of carbon stored in trees, through their reforestation programs and new ways of building carbon in soils to improve crop growth in their agriculture.”

Dr Jones said Qinghai Province suffered from severe land degradation and soil erosion, like many areas in Australia. Huge areas of China are now being re-afforested to improve the landscape but the Chinese want to know how much carbon these new forests will sequester.

“In China, forestry organisations also oversee other areas like agriculture, water resources and catchment management issues,” Dr Jones said.

“They are very interested in linking forestry carbon sequestration to soil carbon sequestration, and they are beginning to be very interested in using farm wastes to generate renewable energy as well as biochar (a form of charcoal) - which can be put in the soil to obtain better crop growth, decreasing the amount of fertiliser used and decreasing greenhouse gas emissions.

“The problem, however, is to work out how we can measure the amounts of sequestered carbon and form a regional or domestic carbon market which will provide income for Chinese farmers,” Dr Jones said.

Partners in the China Project, as it is now called, also include the Bureau of Resource Science in Canberra and the Centre for Energy and Environmental Markets at the University of New South Wales. Funding of the one-year pilot study comes from AusAid and is administered through the Australia-China Environment Development Fund.

Dr Jones is currently working with Dr Iain MacGill, an expert in carbon markets from the UNSW. The China Project will involve a capacity training exercise at Southern Cross University for eight to 10 Chinese professionals and then a pilot project at a study site in Qinghai Province.

At the end of the project an international seminar will be held in Beijing with international donor agencies to build the project into a five-year program.

Photo: Dr Graham Jones, fourth from right, at a planning workshop in Beijing to formulate the China Project. (High resolution image available on request.)