Global Forest Watch

Forest Carbon Emissions

This gross emission layer is part of the forest carbon flux model described in Harris et al. (2021). This paper introduces a geospatial monitoring framework for estimating global forest carbon fluxes which can assist a variety of actors and organizations with tracking greenhouse gas fluxes from forests and in decreasing emissions or increasing removals by forests.

Created
Sep 25, 2024
Last Updated
Sep 25, 2024
Caution:
  • This dataset has been updated since its original publication.
  • Data are the product of modeling and thus have an inherent degree of error and uncertainty. Users are strongly encouraged to read and fully comprehend the metadata and other available documentation prior to data use.
  • Values are applicable to forest areas only (canopy cover >30 percent and >5 m height or areas with tree cover gain). See Harris et al. (2021) for further information on the forest definition used in the analysis.
  • Although emissions in each pixel are associated with a specific year of disturbance, emissions over an area of interest reflect the total over the model period of 2001-2023. Thus, values must be divided by 23 to calculate average annual removals.
  • Emissions reflect stand-replacing disturbances as observed in Landsat satellite imagery and do not include emissions from unobserved forest degradation.
  • Emissions reflect a gross estimate, i.e., carbon removals from any regrowth that occurs after disturbance are not included. Instead, gross carbon removals are accounted for in the companion forest carbon removals layer.
  • Emissions data contain temporal inconsistencies. Improvements in the detection of tree cover loss due to the incorporation of new satellite data and methodology changes between 2011 and 2015 may result in higher estimates of emissions in recent years compared to earlier years. Refer here for additional information.
  • Forest carbon emissions do not reflect carbon transfers from ecosystem carbon pools to the harvested wood products (HWP) pool.
WRI Data
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259 Data Files