Name: Cristian Grisales
Affiliation: CAF – Development Bank of Latin America
Journal title: 5th daily report in Korea – lectures of the AFOLU sector, August 10th, 2022
Date: Aug 11th, 2022


Dear readers of this daily report, good morning.
The name of its noble rapporteur is Cristian Grisales, Senior Climate Change Executive at CAF, the Green Bank of Latin America. 

Our lecture started with Mr. Pil Joo Kim, from the Gyeongsang National University, who told us about the importance of increasing the content of organic carbon in the soil, as a strategy to reduce GHG emissions with an emphasis on the application of biochar in the rice paddies.



We were also informed about direct and indirect emissions from managed soils, the use of CaCO3 to alkalize the soil and its associated environmental impacts, as well as the differences between direct/indirect N2O emissions from managed soils, Indirect N2O emissions from manure management and rice cultivation emissions (CH4) and the denitrification process. The professor also presented the results of including nitrogen for the fertilization of rice fields.



In the afternoon session, we had a reading of the LULUCF sector by Mr. Jong-Su YIM from the Forest ICT Research Center, who introduced us to roles of the LULUCF sector, general approach, GHG inventory for the LULUCF sector in Korea as well as GHG accounting barriers to overcome in the framework of the Paris Agreement.




In addition to the afternoon session, colleagues from Panama, Tongo and Malaysia made interesting presentations on the status of their national inventories with a focus on LULUCF.



Throughout the presentation, interesting discussions were held on the methods used by each of the Korean entities for acquisition and compilation of activity data and emission factors; as well as the problems associated with not having an analogous format for all the entities participating in obtaining the information with the subsequent increase in uncertainty for the LULUCF sector.










Coordinator's comments:
One of my concerns was what if one specific topic(or a source) regarding GHG emission which here I mean rice paddy field covered during the programme was not relevant to country cases of many trainees. So I did some research and learned that rice is a staple food in Colombia which could also indicate that there is a room to compare how emissions from rice paddy fields are estimated in Colombia and Korea. I personally find it interesting and have tried to find relevant information in Colombia’s BUR, but failed to do more study due to a language barrier. (Documents are available only in Spanish. I shall learn Spanish.)
I am looking forward to a day we have an alumni event in the near future, and if we do, please tell about the impact of rice cultivation on GHG emissions (and also Colombian rice dishes!)