Amazon to have database on greenhouse gases
A free-access platform with a wide diversity of data on greenhouse gas emissions in the Amazon is being built by the Research Center for Greenhouse Gas Innovation (RCGI), at the University of São Paulo (USP). The platform will combine variables that control the carbon cycle, in addition to providing assistance in analysis and studies into the region’s role in the global climate.
Currently underway, the first phase consists in the collection of remote sensing data, surface data, and already conducted modeling. Next, the researchers will begin to integrate the various databases and develop the artificial intelligence tools to extract qualified information from the system as a whole.
Project Coordinator Paulo Artaxo said the platform should be ready in up to three years, with the first data expected to be available and monitorable by the end of this year. Artaxo is a professor at the Institute of Physics of the USP and one of the lead scientists at the RCGI.
“The platform’s strong point is, it’s freely accessible to anyone, and it can be used as a tool for the governments of all nine countries in the Amazon basin to devise public policies to reduce deforestation in the region, for instance. Brazil has made an international commitment to bring emissions in the Amazon to zero by 2028, and the big question is: How is the government going to do this?” The system should make it possible to monitor this process, he pointed out.
Regarding the research that can be conducted with the new system, he noted, “whether the Amazon has become a source of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, or whether it’s still absorbing carbon—we still don’t know.”
Big data
The tool is being developed with advanced big data techniques in order to generate data that can be used to monitor gas emissions and better understand their causes, as well as to guide the creation and enforcement of public policies aimed at mitigating emissions. According to RCGI, it should make it possible to gauge the progress in Brazil’s international commitments aimed at slashing deforestation and greenhouse gas emissions in the Amazon ecosystem.
According to the scientist, two topics to be highlighted during analysis are the role of expansion in farming and the impact of climate change on the forest’s photosynthetic life. “We observed that global warming and the change in precipitation in the Amazon are affecting the processes that regulate the absorption and emission of greenhouse gases, with the result that the forest may be starting to lose carbon to the atmosphere,” he said.
This can be alarming, Artaxo argues, as the forest has about 120 billion tons of carbon in its ecosystem—the equivalent of ten years of fuel burning worldwide.
To create viable, efficient, and easily applicable public policies, the scientist says, having reliable data is key. The database, he went on, should provide more reliable data than we have today, and dispel doubts about what is currently disclosed regarding emissions in the Amazon.
