Franz E. Arnold

National Forest Inventory in Myanmar Mangroves

Myanmar has ratified the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) in 1994 and the Kyoto Protocol in 2003 as a non-Annex 1 party. During successive governments of Myanmar, REDD+ has been considered an important contribution to green and sustainable development of the country and an essential element in achieving the goals of the Myanmar Climate Change Strategy and Action Plan through policies and actions in the land use, land use change and forestry sector.

Since then the country has been in a process of establishing the necessary national design elements according to the Warsaw framework for REDD+ with different projects and programmes including UN-REDD Targeted Support (2012-2015), the UN-REDD National Programme (2016 – 2020), the project National Forest Inventory, National Forest Monitoring and Information System with a Human Rights based Approach – NFI-NFMIS-HRBA (2020 – 2021), among others.

The improvement of national capacities for Measurement, Reporting and Verification (MRV) in the context of Climate Change actions has resulted in:

submission of a first national Forest Reference Level (FRL) in 2018 and in 2019 an updated FRL version following response to a Technical Assessment process;
upgrading of the National Forest Monitoring System (NFMS) with design and testing of a new National Forest Inventory (NFI) and a fully functional satellite-based land monitoring system (SLMS);
design of a Safeguard Information System (SIS) and the submission of a Summary of Information on Safeguards (SoI) to the UNFCCC in 2019;

A final draft of a National REDD+ Strategy and Action Plan (NRS), fully validated by stakeholders in 2019 and an NDC with updated quantitative targets of emission reductions (ER) from the forestry and other land use sector (FOLU) submitted to UNFCCC in July 2021 are available too.

However, no specific baseline as a benchmark for REDD+ in Myanmar mangroves exists, as yet and existing data sets on carbon densities in mangrove forests are deficient or absent. The national FRL of Myanmar could not provide forest type specific data on land area, area change, carbon stock and changes in carbon stocks and included also only two REDD+ activities (deforestation, enhancement of carbon stick through forest plantations).

National Forest Inventory in Myanmar mangroves

With the availability of a national scale forest inventory approach for all forest types including mangroves and enhanced land monitoring capacities in Myanmar, the potential exists for developing updated and reliable forest type specific biomass and carbon stock data, and include additional REDD+ activities especially forest degradation and forest restoration, both in reference levels and the assessment of results and performance of REDD+ in the future.

During the field seasons of 2019 and 2020 between the months of January – April data collection on pre-defined National Forest Inventory (NFI) field sites took place, both in mangrove and other forest types. In Ayeyarwady region mangroves in all three districts (Pyapon, Pathein, Latputta) were covered, and in Tanitharyi region the districts Kawthaung and Dawei (Myeik district was not included because of funding restrictions). The sampling design and data collection methodology follows the approaches developed during the years 2017 – 2019 collaboratively between the Forest Department of Myanmar, FAO and the Finnish Natural Resources Institute, Luke.

The project UN-REDD Mangroves TA to Myanmar

The project “Integrating Mangroves Sustainable Management, Restoration and Conservation into REDD+ Implementation in Myanmar” (UN-REDD Mangroves TA to Myanmar) is a collaborative project among UNDP, UNEP and FAO with the objective of supporting Myanmar in achieving its emissions’ reductions targets as well as enhancing livelihoods of forest communities in six districts (covering 56% of national mangrove cover) in Ayeyarwady, Mon, Rakhine and Tanintharyi regions.

In the context of this project the first processing and analysis of NFI field data for mangroves in Myanmar was carried out during 2022/23 in support of its output 2 with activities to (1) develop updated emission/removal factors and (2) improve carbon accounting and monitoring of carbon emissions/ removals for Myanmar’s Mangrove areas.

Data analysis and results for C-stocks

The variables analysed include the following (biomass and carbon pools in Mg per ha[1])

Above ground
Below ground
Coarse deadwood (lying), and
Soil Organic Carbon

A summary of the results of the C-stock analysis are presented in figure 1.

Figure 1: C-stock in four C-pools of Myanmar mangrove forests in Mg ha-1

The results indicate that carbon densities per area units in mangrove forests with 375.57 ± 18.29 Mg ha-1 in Ayeyarwady and 431.80 ± 20.51 Mg ha-1 in Tanintharyi are between 11 and more than 12 times higher than the respective average national level value covering all forest types as calculated for the first national scale Forest Reference Level of Myanmar (34.21 ± 4.14 Mg C ha-1). However, between 90 – 97% of the carbon stock in mangroves is stored in the soil and sediments. Even the predominantly heavily degraded mangrove forests in the Ayeyarwady region are still storing large amounts of carbon in their soils, at average 364 Mg of carbon per ha with a range of 250 – 500 Mg per ha.

The corresponding emission factors measured in Mg CO2 ha-1 (± standard error) for Myanmar mangrove forests are then 1,377.07 ± 67.04 in Ayeyarwady and 1,583.27 ± 75.18 in Tanintharyi region. This also means that deforestation in mangrove forests understood as transformation into other land use classes (e.g. coastal development, shrimp farms, paddy rice fields behind ditches) results in more than ten times higher carbon losses per area unit than for the average forest in Myanmar.

Actions aimed at conservation and restoration of mangrove forest in Myanmar with their high carbon density and very long-time capacity of storing carbon, even in stages of advanced degradation, are extraordinary contributions to achieving the NDC targets of the FOLU sector while protecting the livelihoods of local communities.

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