Working Paper N°2/2025: Assessing CO2 Emissions from Deforestation and Fires in Bolivia during 2010 – 2023

Summary

This report estimates annual greenhouse gas emissions from deforestation and fires in Bolivia from 2010 to 2023, considering both emissions and absorptions resulting from land clearing, land use change, fires, and forest regeneration.
Using high-resolution annual land cover maps from MapBiomas Bolivia (1985–2023), and a global biomass density map, we track carbon pool changes at a 30×30m resolution. We developed a bookkeeping model to monitor carbon storage across 1.2 billion land cover pixels nationwide.

Fortunately, 93% of these pixels showed no significant forest change, allowing us to focus on the 80 million pixels that experienced changes during the period of analysis. These pixels were categorized into 1,278 classes of change based on the year, original land cover, resulting land cover and forest type.

To estimate emissions from forest degradation due to fires, we used the Global Fires Emissions Database and subtracted emissions from deforestation within burned areas to prevent double counting.

Our results indicate that greenhouse gas emissions from deforestation and forest degradation due to fires in Bolivia frequently exceed 200 million tCO₂ per year, making Bolivia a significant contributor to global warming, with per capita emissions among the highest in the world.

Alarmingly, an increasing share of these emissions results from forest burning with no apparent productive purpose.

An Excel workbook with all the calculations and results at the municipal level accompanies this article, as do raster maps of net carbon emissions from deforestation at the 100x100m resolution and fire emissions at the 500x500m resolution.