National metric challenges facing the Costa Rican goal of achieving carbon - neutrality by 2021

Abstract

This paper analyzes weaknesses faced by the carbon neutrality initiative proposed by the Costa Rican government due to metrics and highlights some of the technical improvements that will be required in order to achieve greater comparability, applicability and confidence from the results obtained. Technical gaps are found not only in the assessment of greenhouse gas emissions but when accounting for biogenic carbon capture and storage, where global reference values, usually those reported by the IPCC, are commonly used. We then make reference to problems associated with their use, mainly related to the uncertainty (accuracy and precision) that results from any estimate. At the national level there is a lack of information for biomass and carbon for some ecosystems as well as few complete studies that consider all carbon pools at the ecosystem level. We give examples for some of the most studied species. Finally, we compare results using global reference values against those developed from local studies a the national level.

Keywords

• Biomass
• Biogenic carbon capture and storage
• Carbon neutrality
• Metric
• Emissions of greenhouse gases