Improving how forests are measured does not directly remove carbon from the atmosphere. Its value lies elsewhere: preventing systematic mis-accounting that leads to excess emissions.
In a carbon-constrained world, measurement error translates into physical risk. If removals are overstated, more CO₂ is emitted elsewhere under the false assumption that it has been offset. The climate system responds to reality, not accounting.
Global forests are currently estimated to remove approximately 7.6 billion tonnes of CO₂ per year on a net basis. However, as discussed previously, uncertainty in forest carbon flux measurements is approximately ±30%.
At this level of uncertainty, the implied annual range of error is:
This does not mean that all of this carbon is mis-counted in one direction. But it does mean that current systems lack the ability to reliably distinguish real removals from statistical noise at gigatonne scale.
Peer-reviewed evidence consistently shows that incorporating LiDAR into forest carbon measurement workflows reduces uncertainty to approximately ±10%.
Applying this reduction globally would reduce the uncertainty range by two-thirds, lowering annual mis-counting to:
The difference - 1.52 billion tonnes annually - represents carbon that would no longer be mistakenly assumed to be safely removed.
Carbon accounting operates over multi-decade horizons. Small annual errors compound into large cumulative effects.
Assuming:
This implies a conservative 50-year evaluation period. The cumulative reduction in mis-counted carbon thus amounts to:
This is not an estimate of carbon actively removed. It is an estimate of emissions that would not be mistakenly permitted due to improved confidence in forest carbon accounting.
The avoided emissions described here do not rely on new land, new biology, or new behaviour. They arise purely from seeing the system more clearly.
This reframes measurement from a supporting function into a form of climate intervention:
In a world where every billion tonnes of CO₂ matters, measurement quality itself becomes a lever on the climate system.
The next step is to translate what this better measurement does for rising temperatures.
That is the subject of the next section.