Satellite Shots to Help Settle Deforestation Claims

New satellite images of Oddar Meanchey province promise to help settle wildly conflicting deforestation estimates inside a 64,000-hectare area, which is set to anchor the country’s first forest-based carbon trading scheme. With the project potentially ready to sell carbon credits to foreign firms in a matter of months, recent reports have emerged of logging in the designated area. Those reports claim deforestation rates of about 6 percent, according to the U.N., though others has said that as much as 40 percent of the forest has been logged. Amanda Bradley, a program director for Pact, the NGO helping to bring the project to the carbon trading market with the government and an American broker, said that new satellite imaging maps could help settle the matter. At stake are potentially tens of millions of dollars in carbon credit sales, much of which is earmarked to go back into local communities in Oddar Meanchey province. The new satellite images, she said, “will be able to give us a rough idea of forest cover and what the rate of deforestation has been.” …