Carbon budget is an amount of carbon dioxide that a country, company or organization has agreed is the largest it will produce in a particular period of time.

Inaugurating the workshop, V.Gopinathan, Principal Chief Conservator of Forests, Kerala, said that calculating carbon credits helped identify the capacity of forests to absorb carbon and highlight the importance of forests and their conservation. “Allometric equation is helpful and useful to the Forest Department,” he said.

Delivering the keynote address, Anmol Kumar, Director General, Forest Survey of India, spoke about the importance of the active agenda of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC).

K.K. Ramachandran, Member Secretary, Kerala State Council for Science, Technology and Environment; Matieu Henry, Forestry Officer, FAO, Rome; P. S. Easa, Director, KFRI; and S.Sandeep, scientist; spoke.

The workshop pointed out that proper estimation of tree biomass was essential to determining annual changes of carbon stored in particular ecosystems.

Such estimates are the core of any carbon sequestration project. Efficient and accurate systems of Measurement, Reporting and Verification (MRV) mechanisms are required in the region to properly assess carbon stocks in these tropical ecosystems and support international climate change efforts. The use of suitable allometric equations is a crucial step in any effort towards non-destructive estimation of ground biomass and carbon storage.

Information on the existing allometric models needs to be assimilated. An elaborate database on tree allometric equations in South Asia has been developed by the KFRI with the support of the Food and Agricultural Organisation.

About 30 delegates from Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Nepal, Bhutan and India are attending the workshop.

Seventeen papers will be presented in the next three days.