California Institute for Energy and Environment (CIEE)

This report’s goal is to quantify the baseline of changes in carbon stocks on forest and range lands in California for the decade of the 1990s. The focus here is on carbon but first approximation estimates are also given for non-CO2 greenhouse gases (GHGs) where appropriate. Baselines provide an estimate of the emissions and removals of greenhouse gases due to changes in the use and management of land. In addition they are useful for identifying where, within the landscape of California, major opportunities could exist for enhancing carbon stocks and/or reducing carbon sources to potentially mitigate greenhouse gas emissions. The 2002 California Energy Commission report1 estimated the emissions and removals of GHGs from all economic sectors of the State for the period 1990–1999, generally at one-year intervals. However, the sections of the Energy Commission’s 2002 report on the forest and rangeland sectors were incomplete and did not include all the changes taking place on these lands. In 2004 Winrock published a report on baseline emissions from forests, rangelands and agriculture from the same time period (Brown et al. 2004), however, in this earlier report data for only three out of the five regions were available for assessment. In this report all five regions are included and enhancements have been made in how the carbon sequestration of forest and rangeland areas with no measureable changes in canopy cover is accounted.