The four-year pilot project in Anji County in China aims to utilize the Integrated Global Greenhouse Gas Information System (IG3IS) approach, namely accurate atmospheric measurements combined with inverse modeling, to assess the carbon sequestration capacity of the bamboo forest.  

With the implementation of the Paris Agreement underway, it is important for national and subnational stakeholders to consider all available methodologies that can guide greenhouse gas emission mitigation and climate change adaptation. As the levels of the greenhouse gases in the atmosphere are controlled by the budget of the sources and sinks, one of the mitigation options is to increase the uptake of the carbon dioxide from the atmosphere (e.g. sequestration planning using different forest and land types).  

Bamboo forests can be very good tools for carbon sequestration, total ecosystem bamboo forest carbon ranges from 94 to 392 tC/ha (Yuen et al., 2017). Most of large size bamboo species grow faster than fast growing tree species. Importantly, bamboo forest can be harvested selectively, annually with no damage to the environment. Harvested culms will be replaced by new culms within a year. With the modern technology, bamboo products can be made very durable, they can last for at least 30 years and can substitute for other materials such as wood, aluminum, PVC, concrete and metal.

To account for bamboo forest emissions/uptake, some countries are using the 2006 IPCC Guidelines for National Greenhouse Gas Inventories to report on bamboo, approximating bamboo with a tree, IPCC guidelines provide very specific details for measuring tree species but not for bamboos.  

In this project, an innovative observations-based methodology complements the traditional approach to the emission inventory. The IG3IS provides a general framework for the observations-based emission/removals evaluation. In the case of the landscape scale application, like in this project, the methodology will be tested as applied to the small scale and complex terrain. Atmospheric observations will be used as an input to the high-resolution inverse models to deduct CO2 flux. Supplementary measurements will be used to attribute the fluxes to photosynthetic activity. These estimates will be then compared with the changes in carbon stocks calculated following emission inventory approach. The good practices from New Zealand will be used to guide methodological developments.