Read the following passage and questions, then choose the right answer from options, the answer should be one of A, B, C, D.

<passage>:
From the late 19th century into the 20th, the Raj introduced legislation that reduced the rights of local people to use their forests. From 1916 to 1921, villagers in Kumaon set hundreds of forest fires in protest against such legislation. They depended on forests for firewood for heating and cooking, manure for fields and fodder for livestock. This demand was seen as running contrary to the needs of the British, who wanted to carve up the forests of Kumaon to create railway sleepers. British officials used the excuse that local practices were environmentally destructive to defend the regulation of vast areas of forest. Nearly half the land in Kumaon was taken over by the forest department which, by the beginning of the 20th century, was endeavouring to protect land from fire as well as clamp down on cattle grazing and fodder harvests. In response to the regulations and reclassifications landing on them, villagers broke the rules. Fodder and fuel was extracted, livestock was grazed. British forest officers were fed misinformation like a fire is fed wood. What is happening here may resemble a comedy of elemental errors, but it has significance far beyond the mountainous forests of Kumaon, one of two regions in the state of Uttarakhand. Rai is working with a number of other ecologists and field assistants on the pithily titled research project, Long-term Monitoring of Biomass Stocks and Forest Community Structures in Temperate Zone of Western Himalaya. Spearheaded by the non-governmental Centre for Ecology Development and Research (CEDAR) and funded by India's Department of Science and Technology, this project is about climate change. It seeks to find out how much carbon is being absorbed by the region's forests. This is achieved by taking the information collected – foliage overlay, the height of the trees, leaf area index and canopy layer, among other things – and using it to make an allometric equation. Understanding the basic mechanism of carbon sequestration and the level of human disturbance in these forests can then provide the framework for a plan that seeks to pay local people to maintain the forests. If the project can determine how much human interaction with the forest has affected the trees' ability to photosynthesise, then local people can be paid to preserve the forest. Otherwise, its ability to act as a 'carbon sink' (anything that absorbs more carbon than it releases) risks damage from overuse. – were created to manage the forests of Kumaon. Villagers could once again use their land the way they saw fit, free from the commercial priorities of the colonial government. This new plan to preserve the forests of the region in the 21st century is also being met with accusations of imperialism. Right now, the forests of Kumaon are used primarily for fodder and fuel. Traditionally, families in the area had as many as 15 or 20 cows of their own. These cows were particularly dependent on the forest leaves for fodder and bedding. The fewer leaves a tree has, the less able it is to photosynthesise properly. Today, there are far fewer cows in the area and so fodder use has come down by a multiple of four or five in the last 10 years. The market has come to Kumaon – once an isolated area – and artificial substitutes for fodder are now available to buy locally, with NGOs providing subsidies for this. But while the pressure on the forest to provide fodder has come down, the need for it to provide fuel has gone up. This is in the Himalayan foothills, after all, and it gets cold in winter. There is little central heating and so a serious amount of wood is needed for fires to heat houses and light stoves. Where extended families once lived together, with grandparents, parents and children all under one roof, now the nuclear family is becoming the norm, meaning that requirement for fuel has gone up. And if the people of Kumaon are to use the forest less, they need compensation, or they will have no fire to warm them through the winter months. Substitutes for wood are available but are unaffordable for most. So the challenge for this project mirrors the challenge faced by climate change scientists and policymakers across the world: how can you reduce fossil fuel emissions and maintain and improve carbon sinks without disrupting or destroying the lives of local people, many of whom will be those most affected by climate change? Rai started working on the project in March 2014. He grew up in Delhi and was something of a tech prodigy. But as his career was advancing at the kind of rate that would leave most people sick with jealousy, he also felt something akin to the call of the wild. More intellectually curious than professionally ambitious, he enrolled at Dr BR Ambedkar University as a master's student and, in December 2013, travelled to Kumaon to work on his dissertation, which was on a tree called Kumaon's unique elements appealed to Rai. The area has two main types of oak tree, a number of pines, rhododendrons, cedars and maples. There are leopards, porcupines, wild boars, a variety of snakes and rodents, and 200 species of butterfly. The forests grow down hillsides into valleys and up along plateaus. There are now 40 forest plots in Kumaon, and the hope is that in the next couple of years that total will rise to 100. One night, I join Amogh Rai for dinner at the house of one of his two field assistants, Narendra. Narendra remembers that, in these times, when far more people kept cattle, the forest was a place almost everyone used and understood. "We used to go out in a throng and bring trees down to use the leaves for manure, which is also used as a bedding for cattle," he says. "The animals would piss and shit on it and then it was used as manure." Today, keeping cattle has become economically unviable and artificial fertiliser can be bought at the market. As a result, fewer people use and understand the forest. "There is a strong relationship between the people and the forest in the area but it has weakened, for good and for bad," Rajesh Thadani, who also worked closely with Narendra, tells me. Good because the forest is less disturbed, bad because caring for the forest now comes less naturally. "People don't quite have the same religious and cultural attachment to it. Cattle became unprofitable. The quality of schools hasn't got better but most children now go to school, so they don't want to do agricultural work when they leave… If you don't feel a sense of ownership and belonging, you are less likely to do things. The expectation of money has arrived. The forest has become an externality." There is a conflict and a contradiction here: local people may be paid to preserve the forest by using it less, but using the forest less will weaken their ties to it, thus making the desire to preserve it less urgent. It's the kind of dilemma globalised industrial capitalism throws up everywhere. The system itself has wreaked havoc on the environment, but in a structure where even people in remote areas often aspire to a certain kind of lifestyle and expect to be paid for things they might once have done for free as part of the collective harmony of a community, the monetising of things like forest maintenance has come to be seen as a potential solution.

<question>:
Why was Rai collecting data on the forests in Kumaon?

<options>:
A To do research for a sporting goods company looking to build a factory there
B To determine the level of carbon sequestration happening there
C The collect census data on the number of people who live in the forest
D To do research for the government on the amount of cattle in the forest

<answer>:

B