Abstract
Reducing emissions from deforestation and forest degradation (REDD+) is viewed as an effective way to mitigate climate change by compensating stewards of forested areas for minimizing forestland conversion and protecting forest services. Opportunity costs assess the cost of foregone opportunity when preserving the forest instead of investing in an alternative activity or resource use. This paper questions the calculation method of opportunity costs using averaged economic benefits and co-benefits of different land-use transitions. We propose a nested approach to land-use transitions at the interface between landscapes and livelihoods and assessing a wide range of potential socio-ecological costs and benefits. Combining household surveys and focus groups with participatory mapping, we applied the approach in villages of Laos, Vietnam and China positioned along a broad transition trajectory from subsistence shifting cultivation to intensive commercial agriculture. By looking beyond the economics of land use, we highlight important linkages between land-use changes and livelihood differentiation, vulnerability and inequalities. Our results show the importance of addressing the impacts of land-use transitions on a wide range of potential ecological and socioeconomic costs and benefits at multiple levels.
Highlights
The global mechanism for reducing emissions from deforestation and forest degradation and enhancement of forest carbon stocks (REDD+) is envisaged as a form of payment for ecosystem services (PES), whereby stewards of forested areas are paid to minimize forestland conversion and protect forest services, such as carbon storage and sequestration
Our results show that REDD+ like payments would have a very limited influence on land-use transitions in the case of China where the village landscapes are already fully converted to perennial cash crops or in Laos where policy driven land-use restrictions have already played the role that would be assigned to a REDD+ project without adequate compensations to maintain livelihood standards of the forest dependent populations living in the vicinity of national parks
There would be no additionality of a REDD+ project in such a location as has been shown in a remote sensing-based study as well [29]
Summary
The global mechanism for reducing emissions from deforestation and forest degradation and enhancement of forest carbon stocks (REDD+) is envisaged as a form of payment for ecosystem services (PES), whereby stewards of forested areas are paid to minimize forestland conversion and protect forest services, such as carbon storage and sequestration. The opportunity costs of the land use replacing the forest largely determine whether local people will prefer REDD+. Opportunity costs analysis aims at assessing whether the rent on forest carbon sequestration that would reach the actors of deforestation and forest degradation can offset the foregone land-use and livelihood opportunities due to conserving forest areas or leaving degraded forests to regenerate. Various approaches are being used and developed for estimating opportunity costs in relation to carbon sequestration and REDD+ [3,4,5,6,7,8]. These approaches can be gathered into two main categories according to their scale of significance and their potential contribution to actual REDD+ implementation: large-scale aggregated approaches and sub-national empirical approaches
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