A study by IPAM (Instituto de Pesquisa Ambiental da Amazônia), which proposes an innovative methodology for measuring gas emissions, has won the 2024 Editor’s Choice Awards in the Emerging Regions category. The award was granted by the journal Environmental Research Letters on April 3rd.
The award was created in 2018 and highlights the journal’s best publications. Each year, the selection is made by the Editorial Board, made up of researchers from all areas of environmental science, from various parts of the world.
“The award celebrates the work we have done at SEEG to produce emissions data in the land use sector with high spatial and temporal granularity. The methodology has already been adopted by some Brazilian states and municipalities as part of their voluntary emissions inventories. Therefore, this recognition confirms the importance and quality of the method,” says Bárbara Zimbres, a researcher at IPAM and the main author of the publication.
In addition to Zimbres, three other researchers and IPAM’s Director of Science are authors of the research, respectively: Julia Shimbo, Felipe Lenti, Edriano Souza and Ane Alencar.
This is the second time that IPAM has had an article awarded by the magazine, the first being in 2022, with a study on impunity for illegal deforestation, carried out in collaboration with Shimbo, a researcher at IPAM.
Articles that have won awards in previous editions of the category covered topics such as strategies for resolving conflicts over agricultural land in sub-Saharan Africa, as well as climate adaptation and resilience.
The award-winning research
The award-winning article details the new methodology used in the SEEG (System for Estimating Emissions and Removals of Greenhouse Gases), which places Brazil as a benchmark in the measurement of greenhouse gases.
The method’s differential lies in producing more robust and up-to-date data by combining official methodologies with the maps produced by the MapBiomas network, of which IPAM is a member. In addition, the new way of measuring emissions is more complete than other measurement strategies, since it considers all land use processes, such as recovery, degradation and deforestation at a municipal level.
IPAM communications analyst*
