Efficient, Sustainable, and Multifunctional Carbon Offsetting to Boost Forest Management: A Comparative Case Study

Timothée Fouqueray,Lucile Génin,Nathalie Frascaria-Lacoste,Michel Trommetter

doi:10.3390/f12040386

Abstract

Research highlights: Funding forest management with subsidies from carbon offsetters is a well-documented mechanism in tropical regions. This article provides complementary insights into the use of voluntary offset contracts in temperate forests. Background and objectives: The mitigation of greenhouse emissions has become a major global issue, leading to changes in forest management to increase the capacity of forests to store carbon. This can lead to conflicts of use with other forest ecosystem services such as timber production or biodiversity conservation. Our main goal is to describe collective actions to fund carbon-oriented forestry with subsidies from carbon offsetters and to analyze how their governance and functioning prevent conflicts pertaining to multi-functionality. Materials and methods: We assembled an interdisciplinary research team comprising two ecologists, a social scientist, and an economist. Drawing on a conceptual framework of ecosystem services, social interdependencies, and collective action, we based our qualitative analysis on semi-structured interviews from two French case studies. Results: Carbon-oriented intermediary forest organizations offer offset contracts to private firms and public bodies. Communication is geared toward the mitigation outcomes of the contracts as well as their beneficial side effects in providing the ecosystem services of interest to the offsetters. Subsidies then act as a financial lever to fund carbon-oriented forestry operations. Scientific committees and reporting methodologies serve as environmental, social, and economic safeguards. Conclusions: These new intermediary forest organizations use efficient forest operations and evaluation methodologies to improve forest carbon storage. Their main innovation lies in their collective governance rooted in regional forest social-ecological systems. Their consideration of multi-functionality and socioeconomic issues can be seen as an obstacle to rapid development, but they ensure sustainability and avoid conflicts between producers and beneficiaries of forest ecosystem services. Attention must be paid to interactions with broader spatial and temporal carbon policies.

Highlights

The claim that forests and foresters have witnessed significant evolutions in the last few decades is an understatement
We outline here how offset contracts succeeded in cementing bonds between professionals tasked with the development of forestry operations, private and public structures interested in greenhouse gas (GHG) mitigation, and landowners struggling to fund the management of their forests
The two carbon organizations did not innovate in terms of the technical operations adopted to store more carbon in forests—they retained the best practices known to date

Summary

Introduction

The claim that forests and foresters have witnessed significant evolutions in the last few decades is an understatement. Along with social and technical developments, it is routine to point to global changes as drivers of the spatiotemporal trajectories of forest socioecosystems (FSES) [1]. Among the most pressing global issues (with land degradation), climate change has buoyed considerable research efforts in the forest sciences [2,3]. While undeniable research progress has been made for the mitigation of and adaptation to climate change, the indirect consequences of mitigation and adaptation actions on FSES remain underexplored. Mitigation is rarely tackled from the perspective of its social or economic consequences (e.g., [5])—with the notable exceptions of investigations into the Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation (REDD+) program [6] and in some European case studies [7,8]

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Conclusion