Eduardo Ditt
Practitioner Fellow at International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN)
Location:
Brazil
Project Title: Feasibility of Standard Procedures for Monitoring Ecosystem Services Projects in the Atlantic Forest
Publications and Presentations: Forthcoming
Project Description
The benefits that forests provide to humans, such as removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, are known as ecosystem services. Market mechanisms to pay for ecosystem services have the potential to generate funds for conserving and restoring forests in highly degraded areas, such as the Atlantic Forest.
Recently, a market mechanism for carbon has been created to finance forest restoration as a means to mitigate climate change and provide other social and environmental benefits.
Eduardo Ditt is using his Alcoa Foundation fellowship to develop standard procedures for quantifying and demonstrating this service. These procedures will be based on an estimation of how much carbon is being removed from the atmosphere and stored in the forest biomass.
"To achieve my research objective, I need to analyze data obtained from measuring trees of different ages in forest restoration projects," said Ditt. "Furthermore, I will develop standard procedures for collecting data in the forest and using these data for demonstrating the real benefits of projects that aim to mitigate climate change. The findings of this research will be used to show how the results of a carbon/forest restoration project can be monitored, verified, and certified."
Biographical Information
Eduardo H. Ditt is an agronomist with a master's degree in environmental science from University of São Paulo, and he is a Ph.D. candidate in environmental research through Imperial College London.
Since 1992, Ditt has been involved in various projects of the Instituto de Pesquisas Ecológicas (IPÊ), one of the largest environmental non-governmental organizations in Brazil. These projects are focused mainly on strategies to conserve remnants of the Atlantic and Amazon forests, including the development of systems of payments for ecosystem services.
In early 2008, Ditt assumed the position of executive director of IPÊ. He is also the director of Arvorar Soluções Florestais, a company created by IPÊ for developing forest restoration and carbon sequestration projects.
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