Climate Change and Forestry: Monitoring and Policies

Course content and focus

The first part of the course deals with climate change risks, mitigation, and adaptation in relation to forestry. It also introduces the concept of forest carbon projects and associated terminology such as additionality, permanence, leakage, and co-benefits. The second part of the course introduces global policies and voluntary initiatives to reduce emissions; particular attention is paid to reducing emissions from deforestation and forest degradation and enhancing forest carbon stocks in developing countries (REDD+). In the last part of the course, students write a supervised term paper that relates forestry and climate change to the global debate on sustainable development.

Relation to the United Nation's Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)

The course particularly relates to SDGs 13 and 15:

SDG13. Climate Action: Deforestation and forest degradation in low-income countries directly account for nearly 20% of human-made annual greenhouse gas emissions. The course specifically focuses on how forests can be governed to mitigate rather than contribute to global climate change. 

SDG15. Life on Land: In addition to carbon storage and C0₂ sequestration, forests, especially natural forests, are habitats for most of the Earth's terrestrial life forms. Further, the hydrological functions of mountain forests contribute to life-supporting rivers and streams throughout the world.