GLOBE-Net, October 10, 2012 - When Robert Falls was a boy he dreamed of becoming an astronaut.   As a young man he was selected from a field of 2400 applicants to be part of the intensive evaluation process to choose Canada's first team of space bound adventurers. 

But a career as astronaut was not to be, and he returned to finish his doctoral studies in resource management science at UBC, undertaking research into photosynthesis and carbon sequestration.  Following graduation, he took this scientific knowledge and a passion for the environment into the business world, leading the Canadian energy industry in sustainable development and climate change policy. 

In 1994 he founded the Greenhouse Emissions Management Consortium (Gemco), Canada's largest consortium of carbon emitters, and in 1997 began working on climate mitigation projects in China for Shell Canada Ltd. 

Following the China experience, which focussed on technology transfer, he explored the carbon sequestration potential of oceans.  In 2004, Robert finally settled on forest ecosystems as the most practical and necessary focus for climate mitigation.   ERA, a Canadian-based pioneer in forest carbon offset programs and project development, was born. 

Following a seven year term, Dr Falls stepped down as  ERA Carbon Offsets C.E.O. (See GLOBE-Net article "ERA Acquisitions to Create Powerhouse Carbon Offsets Company in BC"), to combine his first interest in space, with tackling  what he continues to believe are amongst humanity's greatest challenges - managing the world's ecosystems and resources, and tackling climate change. 

"There is more at stake than conservation and atmospheric instability.  Ecosystems and the associated natural resources they provide us are tightly linked to global and local economies," says Falls.  The air we breathe, the water we drink, the food we eat, the energy we consume, are all derived from and cycled through our fragile Biosphere. 

"Until mankind ventured into space, our impression of Earth's life support system was highly distorted.  The reality is that the thin blue line of our atmosphere is about equivalent in scale to the film of our breath on a billiard ball." Robert Falls

"If we start with the premise that we are loading the atmosphere with carbon dioxide much faster than the planet's photosynthetic systems, largely forests,  are removing it," he says " then it becomes clear that we must manage the equation  to balance carbon emissions and carbon removals.  If we fail, we will leave a legacy of climatic instability and depleted resources for future generations to grapple with". 

Better Forest Management

What then is the solution? "A better system of management is a good start, -- as the adage goes, 'we cannot manage what we cannot monitor.' Clearly what we require is a cost-effective system to monitor forests on a global scale" says Falls. 

Finding that cost-effective system is at the heart of his latest venture as co-founder of Biosphere Management Systems Inc. (BMSI), a company focussed on  providing an effective space-based platform for global forest monitoring. 

"The world's four billion hectares of forests are currently degrading and disappearing at an unprecedented rate, and not just in developing countries", notes Falls. 

British Columbia has lost nearly 20 million hectares of forests due to the pine beetle infestations, believed to be exacerbated by climate change. This is the equivalent to over 70 years of logging, and will have profound impacts on the economy of the province for decades to come.  Russia and Canada share the great boreal forests, accounting for one third of the total global forest cover. Beetle infestations, unauthorized logging,  and unsustainable harvesting present a spectrum of management challenges to these and other countries having significant forest assets.  

On average, the world's total forests experience a 2% annual change due to all forms of major disturbance. That may seem small in relative terms, but on-the-ground the implications can be dramatic and long-lived.  

As a consequence of pine beetle infestations, B.C.'s forests have transitioned from being a net remover of carbon dioxide, to a net source, now eclipsing industrial emissions.  Less carbon removed from the atmosphere translates into less wood produced, as wood is composed of atmospheric carbon removed by photosynthesis.  Impacts to the economy will be  increasingly significant, including mill closures, job losses, and an uncertain future for many forest dependent communities. 

Restoring  blighted areas requires an understanding of current environmental conditions and dynamics to ensure that whatever measures are undertaken will prove to be cost-effective and sustainable.  But before that, impacted areas need to be identified and characterized. 

Remote Sensing from Space

It is neither practical nor cost-effective to monitor the global forests on the ground, or even using airborne systems.  Enter space-based remote sensing and BMSI. 

Using the capabilities of latest generation wide-scanning radar and multi-spectral optical satellites, it is now possible to delineate the 98% of the forests that have not had any significant disruption, and therefore do not require further management resources and attention, from the 2% that do. This will allow resource managers to cost-effectively deploy assets to address the areas of change. 

As the planet's major forest areas are often hidden by cloud, synthetic aperture radar satellites such as Canada's RADARSAT-2 could be effectively used to acquire data through cloud and darkness.  At the same time, multi-spectral optical satellites can "zoom in" on specific areas of interest to provide more detailed information on the dynamics of the disturbances that are changing forest cover on the ground.  

One such system is offered by RapidEye, a constellation of 5 high-resolution satellites that cover the world's forests every 2 days. These satellites can be used to determine the source of disturbances and thereby help forest managers to pinpoint strategies to deal with problems at hand, or deploy other assets such as airborne photography or ground personnel.

RapidEye's space assets were first developed in Germany in part through the help of the European Union, the State of Brandenburg and a banking consortium consisting of KfW, Commerzbank, and Export Development Canada, with Vancouver-based MacDonald Dettwiler and Associates as a prime contractor. RapidEye's assets have been recently acquired by BlackBridge Aerospace, a Canadian company that provides satellite and ground support services from facilities in Lethbridge, Alberta. 

Authorized users will use BMSI tools and analytics not only to determine change, but help determine the cause of such change. The automation of change detection using the hierarchical approach could provide the key to cost-effective global forest monitoring. 

BMSI in association with industry, government and university researchers have established an initial pilot project covering 100,000 square kilometers of BC's diverse forest types. The goal of the system is to not only collect and calibrate satellite data from BC forests in a timely manner, but to perform computation on this data in a way that is both practical and predictive. 

If successful, the market rollout of the technology will begin across Canada and then expand internationally through BMSI's network of associates, using a proprietary web-based environment that will allow users in each country to subscribe to and become part of a secure Cloud structure. 

During his years at ERA Carbon Offsets, Dr. Falls and his team implemented innovative award-winning forest projects that tapped carbon finance as a means for climate mitigation and conservation in Canada, the United States, and Africa.   

In an exclusive interview with GLOBE-Net earlier this year, Dr. Falls stated that "When we founded ERA, and before our first tree was in the ground, I would say that our goal was to start a wave of ecological restoration and protection in our own backyard that would reverberate around the world." 

Robert Falls' return to space via Biosphere Management Systems Inc may be less exciting than an astronaut's walk in space, but it could prove to be far more important in helping the rest of us back on earth to solve the global problems of climate change and ecosystem degradation.