🔆UNESCO World Heritage Forests
✅why in News: As per UNESCO’s assessment on World Heritage forests, India’s Sundarbans National Park is among five sites that have the highest blue carbon stocks globally.
▪️Key findings of the new study
✅ It is the first ever scientific assessment of the amounts of greenhouse gases emitted
from and absorbed by forests in UNESCO World Heritage sites during 2001 and 2020.
✅ The assessment involved the researchers from UNESCO, World Resources Institute
(WRI) and the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN).
✅As a whole, UNESCO World Heritage forests in 257 separate sites, absorbed the equivalent of approximately 190 million tons of CO2 from the atmosphere each year.
✅However, ten forests released more carbon than they sequestered due to pressure from human activity and climate change, which is alarming.
✅They also store substantial amounts of carbon.
✅ The study described blue carbon as organic carbon that is mainly obtained from decaying plant leaves, wood, roots and animals and is captured and stored by coastal and marine ecosystems.
▪️Factors responsible for this emission
✅According to UNESCO’s findings, at some sites the clearance of land for agriculture caused emissions to be greater than sequestration.
✅The increasing scale and severity of wildfires, often linked to severe periods of drought, was also a predominant factor in several cases.
✅ Other extreme weather phenomena, such as hurricanes contributed at certain sites.
✅World Heritage forests
✅As of today, more than 200 World Heritage sites harbor unique forest ecosystems.
✅World Heritage forests, whose combined area of 69 million hectares is roughly twice the size of Germany, are biodiversity-rich ecosystems.
