sCreen – Fast Tract Estimation of Carbon Benefits from Forestry
Activities
Dr. Carmenza Robledo (Ecoexistence, Robledo Abad Althaus)

DAY1
Session 3

sCreen – Fast Tract Estimation of Carbon Benefits from Forestry Activities
Dr. Carmenza Robledo (Ecoexistence, Robledo Abad Althaus)

In my professional life, I experience often the field of tension between what science would like to do,what policymakers think that is important, and what people in the field need, what they want and what they areable to do. This tool has been an answer to these difficulties that we have observed between what has been
said by the policymakers, what science is requiring, and what people at the field are able to do.
I would like to make a statement at the beginning and say that the forestry sector has improved a lot
over the past decade. There are still difficulties but there is plenty of information that we need to use in asmart and in a transparent way.

This is a landscape reality. This is a real picture of a real country with a landscape mosaic including
plenty of different possible uses. However, one would need six different accounting methodologies forrealising the benefits, one for reducing emissions from deforestation , one for carbon enhancement, one for sustainable
forest management, one for reducing degradation, another one for the A/R CDM 1, and if you are lucky,
something for pasture and/or another one for carbons substitution through harvested wood products. Do
we really need this level of complexity for making ascertained management decisions? Are people outside able
Afforestation and Reforestation Clean Development Mechanism:
https://cdm.unfccc.int/Projects/pac/pac_ar.html
1

DAY1
Session 3
to use complex methodologies in an accurate manner? Is that really increasing global accuracy? Does itmake sense?
sCreen is a tool created for getting a good sense of potential mitigation benefits from different
management options. Results from sCreen can create a good basis for comparing benefits from different
REDD+ options and for getting into a informed discussion with stakeholders and decision-makers. The toolsCreen includes five accounting methods, that have been build up in a consistent and comparable manner..

What happened before any type of intervention? We have this type of situation. On one side wecan have a forest that will be converted to non-forest. That is what we call deforestation. On the other side,
we can have forests that will be forests in the future, but will be degraded. To the far left, we havenon-forests that without any type of intervention will be kept as a non-forest. I will walk you through allthese possibilities for a moment.

The first option is we have non-forests that will be in the future non-forest. If we do not doanything, it will be maintained as a non-forest (e.g. pastures). In our intervention we propose a management
activity that change this land-use and create forest (e.g. agroforestry or plantations). We have the effect ofcarbon sequestration and we can produce timber and wood products. For accounting the mitigation benefits
we will have a method called carbon sequestration.

If you look at the curve below at the left side, you see a

blue line indicating what will happen without your intervention and a red line indicating how the carbon curveof your management activity looks like. The red arrows indicate when timber/wood products are extracted

sCreen – Fast Tract Estimation of Carbon Benefits from Forestry
Activities
Dr. Carmenza Robledo (Ecoexistence, Robledo Abad Althaus)

DAY1
Session 3

from your system.
For the climate change community, the wood that goes outside cannot be accounted as part of yourintervention. Under the UNFCCC these products are called harvested wood products. There is an ongoing
discussion about how to deal with harvested wood products.

One option is to use it as an input replacing anenergy more intensive material. That is carbon substitution. In sCreen we don’t quantify the substitution
potential because there are various substitution options. However we account the input that wood would
provide to the carbon substitution effect.

The second effect that we can have regards to an increment of carbon stocks in areas previously
degraded , e.g. through restoration. This effect is called carbon enhancement. If we enhance carbon, because
we make enrichment planting for example, we can in the future also produce timber. Or, if it is not too
much degraded at the moment and we can do sustainable forest management, in this case, we still produce
timber and wood. There are several possibilities for facing forest degradation, as you can see in the slide.

The last possible effect that we consider is when we have forests that would be deforested and ourmanagement activity is aimed to keeping it, either through conservation (e.g. a national park) or we declare it
these areas are sustainable forest management area. In any case, we will have a greenhouse gas emission
reduction effect and if we have sustainable forest management, then we will have also timber production.
Again, you have the curves showing these options in the low right part.

DAY1
Session 3

Summarizing: one can have different baselines or reference scenario (first line), then according tothe starting situation different management options are possible (second line). This allows different mitigation
effects that need to be estimated correspondingly. The tool sCreen allows estimating the potential mitigation
effects of all forestry activities, using only one methodological package. One can create as many scenarios asneeded in a easy and fast manner. This information can facilitate discussions with local stakeholders,
decision-makers and investors and can help to find a balance between climate change mitigation and anotherpriorities at place. Having only one methodological package is important because in reality forest users
combine management practices (e.g. reducing deforestation and promoting plantations). It is very rare thatpeople say, “I am going to stop deforestation, but I do not have any type of agroforestry plantation for foodsecurity.” What happen in the reality is that you have a combination of these activities. Someone saying, “Iwill stop deforestation, but I would have sustainable reduction of food.” Someone else says, “Yes, but I
would have medicinal plants,” and someone else says, “Yes, and I will plant agroforestry trees for increasing
food production.” You need something that allows you to account for all these carbon effects at once in aconsistent and comparable manner.

sCreen – Fast Tract Estimation of Carbon Benefits from Forestry
Activities
Dr. Carmenza Robledo (Ecoexistence, Robledo Abad Althaus)

DAY1Session 3

The tool includes five methods: one for carbon sequestration; one for carbon enhancement; twodifferent ones for greenhouse gas emissions of degradation and deforestation; and the fifth method is in orderto quantify timber and wood products. Further it includes a procedure for treating leakages,and a a list ofdata requirements. We do not want to go to the highest possible level of accuracy. We want to provide
policymakers and stakeholders with enough information for making decisions.

Above you can read the assumptions behind the tool. We consider the historical trend as a goodstarting point for setting the baseline/reference level. We only consider living biomass. We consider thecarbon benefits from timber separately. We consider two drivers of degradation. These are firewood andillegal logging. We follow the IPCC tier approach.

That means that, if you have information at the local

level, you use this information. If you do not have it, you try to get information from your country. If not,you finally go to the IPCC default values. Although they are not perfect, but they are good enough to make ameaningful calculation.
You can combine the results of sCreen with many other of the methods outsideDAY1Session 3

Let us imagine a country.

The information that I will share with you is real information from a realcountry. However, I am not allowed to say which country, because it is still under discussion for the readinessphase of this country, so let us call it Cuzaland. The exercise is done at the national level. . There is apermanent forest estate in Cuzaland and there is forest that is not considered as permanent forest estates andthere are plenty of drivers for changing or for using these forests in different manners.

This is the summary of these drivers. There are different drivers for deforestation, extension ofagricultural livestock in a forest that is already at 90%. There is extension of agricultural forest, as well as otherissues that are important in this country; settlements or mega-infrastructure projects. This is also the reality
in many tropical countries. It is not only that deforestation is happening because of some illegal or not wellthought out activities. For some development priorities, deforestation is occurring as well.
We have degradation of forests, and in this country we have illegal cropping. We have illegal logging.
We have firewood gathering. We have degradation in forest that is already degraded, different type ofactivities.
Further, we have some areas that the country has declared as forest apt areas.
watersheds, abandoned pastures, or biodiversity buffers.

These are

You have the amount of millions of hectares thatare there. Some people in this country say, “Yes, we could use it for getting the maximum mitigation impact.”
Others say, “Hey, are you crazy? We have development ideas in this country.” What you have really is thatyou have very different options. One, what is the maximum mitigation potential that I could get, if I really
do whatever is necessary to mitigate climate change? There are other developmental considerations that cansCreen – Fast Tract Estimation of Carbon Benefits from Forestry
Activities
Dr. Carmenza Robledo (Ecoexistence, Robledo Abad Althaus)

DAY1
Session 3

be done. We have established three possible scenarios: 0 emissions, development A and development B.
Development A and B differ according to options under discussion.

This matrix in this country looks like this. People are thinking about conservation, but also aboutsustainable forest management. They are thinking about getting reduced impacts from settlements, reduced
impacts from these mega-infrastructure projects and so on. What have estimated all activities in the three
scenarios using sCreen

You can compare them in the direction that you want and I will show you how it

looks.

The first case is, that is one of the calculations for reducing deforestation and that is the comparison
between the three possible scenarios.

The blue line is the maximum potential.

The red line is thedevelopment plan A and the green line is the development plan B. In this case, in the development plan B,
we have more conservation and sustainable forest management. That brings us to a higher core for emission
reduction from deforestation.

Of course, the two development plans are far lower than the maximum

climate change mitigation potential.
We did the same for old plantations. In the case of plantations we differentiated the length
required for getting the full plantations. This is dependent of the level of investment available . We
differentiate three scenatios 5, 10 and 20 years. We also considered different schedules for establishing theplantations.

DAY1Session 3

Carbon sequestration in this tool includes not only plantations, but also agroforestry systems. In
other examples that we have used in sCreen, we have built up carbon sequestration curves for agroforestry
systems that were designed by the local communities.

The same we did with enhancement of carbon and in this case, only one of the two curves was far
below the maximum potential, and that is due to their specific activities. Third, we did the same with theemission reductions from degradation.

And finally we consider the timber and wood products. What you see here is in all cases you
produce timber, but in the blue case, which is maximum potential, there is no timber production from natural

sCreen – Fast Tract Estimation of Carbon Benefits from Forestry
Activities
Dr. Carmenza Robledo (Ecoexistence, Robledo Abad Althaus)

DAY1
Session 3

forests, neither secondary nor primary forest. What you have is the timber production at the end of theproject that is the result of any type of plantations, whereas in the other two examples, we allow either somedeforestation for development purposes and/or sustainable forest management.

With sCreen you can also build up each complete scenario complete.
combined for one of the scenarios.

These are all possibilities

You have emission reduction from deforestation, from forest

degradation enhancement, and carbon sequestration for one of the development options that you have. You
can cross the comparisons wherever you want.

These are the aggregated curves. This is the net carbon effect. The baseline has been subtracted
already. What you see here is only net carbon effects.

The conclusions are quite simple if you want. The

blue line is the maximum potential, but it does not consider any development priority and it has a very highinvestment requirements in the first five years whereas the other two have less mitigation potential but are
better inline with development priorities and require less up-front investment.
Building up the sCreen scenarios for this country took us one week. The challenging and mostinteresting part were the discussions with the stakeholders for designing the different scenarios.

Once we

were in the country talking with stakeholders about what exactly they want to do, and the idea with it is thatthey can dedicate more time for two things: for creating the matrix that we have seen at the beginning that allthese activities are considered, and for creating, for analyzing which are the impacts of using one or defining
one or the other way to go.

DAY1Session 3sCreen was designed in a period between 2012 and 2013 as part as a ITTO project in the REDDES
program. The methodology has been reviewed by three international experts.

We conducted tests at thesub-national levels in ITTO projects in Colombia, Ghana, and Malaysia that have different extensions anddifferent activities. The projects were completely different from each other. There was a project with 24
activities in Colombia. The project in Malaysia had only three activities in which we combined reduction ofdegradation and reduction of emissions from deforestation. In the case of Colombia, we used all fivemethods.
In the case of the national country, you have seen we have also used all possibilities with the tooland we are still open to the possibility to create more scenarios or to combine these scenarios in order to findwhat is the optimum for the country, not only from the carbon perspective, but also from the development
perspective.

The main advantage of sCreen is the possibility to estimate potential mitigation effects from allforestry activities with only one tool and one methodological package. You can include all possibilities in thissector through using one methodological set. That makes the results comparable. It allows dialog amongst
stakeholders during the design phase and before management priorities are set. It is easy to use and you canproduce a high number of scenarios. That means that you can compare many management options before
making the final decisions. We do not pretend to have the highest level of accuracy, but we pretend toprovide scenarios that allow policymakers and other stakeholders in the country to discuss and decide what aresCreen – Fast Tract Estimation of Carbon Benefits from Forestry
Activities
Dr. Carmenza Robledo (Ecoexistence, Robledo Abad Althaus)

DAY1
Session 3

the best management activities according to their priorities. It is flexible and it is cheap. It is based on theinformation that the countries have. If they have specific data from the country or from the local level, weuse this data. If not, we use the existing default values (e.g. IPCC). Of course, for us who have built up themodel, it is user-friendly, but we need more users in order to know how user-friendly it really is.