Greenhouse Gas Assessment and Compensation on Brazilian Low Volume Rural Roads Using CarbonROAD—The Santa Rosa de Lima Case

摘要

The “Santa Catarina Rural” is a Program co-funded by The World Bank for improvements on 1300 km of low volume rural roads on Southern Brazil. The pioneer project under the program was on the municipality of Santa Rosa de Lima, where the greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions resulting from the road improvement activities as well as the regular traffic were assessed on an experimental basis using the CarbonROAD software application. Here, we show details of the CarbonROAD software application and the construction emissions assessment procedure as well as the mitigating effect of the plants used for compensation. It was found that most of the emissions come from the road improvement work. This includes earthworks, fuel for motor graders, bulldozers and other machines, and materials and gravel extraction, industrialization and transportation, etc. Only a smaller portion comprises regular road traffic. The accumulated emission balance shows that the carbon absorption is larger than construction emissions after just 15 months. The potential for price appraisal of the generated carbon credits is explored.