Amazonian forests are able to recover their initial carbon stock in 7 to 21 years when they are exploited by techniques minimising the environmental impact. This is what reveals a study conducted at the scale of the Amazon and that was published in the journal Current Biology in September. Bruno Hérault, second author of this article, is a researcher at the CIRAD and is part of the Labex CEBA.
The results of the study show that forests, exploited in a sustainable way, play a fundamental role in carbon storage and therefore in the fight against climate change. It also reveals that the time-period of the rotation cycle of 20 to 30 years, imposed by the forest laws in the Amazon in parallel with selective exploitation, is sufficient for the recovery of carbon stocks.
The study is the first to focus, on the Amazon scale, on the recovery of the aboveground forest biomass after exploitation and it has received the support of the Tropical managed Forests Observatory (TmFO). The study was conducted on 10 experimental sites across the Amazon basin and with 79 plots on a total surface area of 376 hectares. The researchers succeeded in estimating the time required, after exploitation, for the forest to recover its initial carbon stock lost to exploitation in the aerial part of the trees.
Furthermore, this study attempted to find a balance, across the region, between the production of timber and the maintenance of key environmental services such as carbon storage. The authors provide the first results showing that the Amazon rainforests, exploited in a sustainable manner, can renew their stock of carbon during a legal rotation cycle of 20 to 30 years and therefore play an important role in carbon storage.
The TmFO defines sampling intensities ensuring both a sustained timber production while maintaining essential environmental services provided by tropical forests.
*Rutishauser E. et al. (2015). “Rapid tree carbon stock recovery in managed Amazonian forests”, Current Biology, dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2015.07.034
http://www.cell.com/current-biology/abstract/S0960-9822(15)00868-4
