Mr. Iqbal, according to my personal experience working with community forestry in Nepal. Biomass and conservation of forest is more toward the climate change mitigation, but at the same time communities are getting benefits from the government and international agencies. For your ready reference to understand, forest conservation practices, you can see one of our paper "Measuring impacts of community forestry program through repeat photography and satellite remote sensing in the Dolakha district of Nepal.", which discuss different aspects including climate mitigation through community forestry programme.

It depends. For example, from a climate change perspective, the ultimate biomass potential per unit area and the expected logevity of the forest would be important criteria to consider. Also, the risk of forest fires, which would release accrued carbon would be an important. On the alternative energy source side, you would need to consider the aspect of air pollutiion caused from wood burning. The use of forestry biomass for cellulosic conversion to ethanol for fuel has not yet been shown to be economically competitive with fossil fuels.

I suggest not to forget that woody biomass, important energy source in many regions, is a renewable resource, unlike fossil fuels. The cultivation of woody biomass is an activity largely carbon neutral. On the other hand, if part of programs to promote sustainable forestry, contributes to the capture of emissions. No doubt, pollution is an issue to consider, and must be improved combustion systems to make them more efficient and less polluting. So, yes, we can talk about mitigation and fuel substitution.

Thank you for the responses, highly appreciated. So since "biomass as an alternative energy" still in progress and has not been globally applied, we can say that climate change still become the solid background when doing a forest biomass research.

FYI, I am currently working on a research regarding biomass estimation for rubber tree using geospatial data. Does anyone now the best algorithm to calculate biomass especially when we are using ALOS PALSAR satellite data? And how about the ground measurement, I supposed not to use the destructive method so which the suitable method for rubber tree biomass calculation in the field?

I think in Malaysia Rubber Trees (Hevea brasiliensis), allometric equation is available, otherwise you can use purposed by IPCC. Using sample plots and allometric equation you can assess the biomass at plot level. Then extract the parameters (reflectance or radiance or textural) information from ALOS data and through regression analysis method or decision tree modelling, or K-Nearest Neighbor (KNN) etc. extrapolate for entire study area for biomass estimation and mapping (Later on you have to assess the accuracy of quantified map) . For conversion of biomass to carbon stock you can use 0.47 (IPCC factor).

Going back to what Mr. Rolf has said, how has the biomass energy been used recently? I mean how is the progress of the biomass energy development/research? I noticed that we have invented fuel from those non-fossil materials, but it seem to take a few more years until we can globally use it. Does it cost much to produce bio energy?

I believe there was a good review of the status of development of cellolosic biomass to ethanol, whuich was published in Science in the past year or so. Basically, the problem is in develping enzymes that will break down cellolose and lignins in wood to fermentable sugars at a high enough rate that would justify scaling up production. If production can then be sufficiently scaled up, then production of ethanol production could be competitive with fossil fuels. Much effort has been put into this by the private sector, but a breakthrough is still needed. It has turned out to be a very tough problem.

Up to now the change in land use is a major source of CO2 emission, woods from Brazil to Indonesia are destroyed for farming, palm oil a.o.

I estimate, that all efforts of longlasting forestry could hardly compensate for those losses.

The area of the woodland in the northern hemisphere is increased, but the annually sequestered CO2 is less per area than in the tropics, where wood is destroyed. The North is the main source of fossil CO2 - the South of deterioration of soil and biomass.