Abstract
Non-technical summary Conserving tropical forests has many benefits, from protecting biodiversity, sustaining indigenous and local communities, and safeguarding climate. To achieve the ambitious climate goals of the Paris Agreement, forest protection is essential. Yet deforestation continues to diminish the world's forests. Halting this trend is the objective of the international framework for Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and forest Degradation (REDD+). While previous studies have demonstrated the contribution of tropical forests to mitigate climate change, here we show that tropical forest protection can ‘flatten the curve’ of the costs of transition to climate stability, estimating tens of trillions of dollars in policy cost savings.
Highlights
The Paris Agreement established an ambitious environmental target to limit the rise of global temperature to ‘well below’ 2 °C above pre-industrial levels (UNFCCC, 2015)
While previous studies have demonstrated the contribution of tropical forests to mitigate climate change, here we show that tropical forest protection can ‘flatten the curve’ of the costs of transition to climate stability, estimating tens of trillions of dollars in policy cost savings
The greenhouse gas emission reduction pledges that countries have made to date to achieve the Paris goal – the Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) – are critical to reduce the risk of even more extreme temperature increases
Summary
The Paris Agreement established an ambitious environmental target to limit the rise of global temperature to ‘well below’ 2 °C above pre-industrial levels (UNFCCC, 2015). Recent efforts to address some of these deficiencies identified in previous DICE analyses have focused on updating (i) the economic damage functions, (ii) the underlying climate science, (iii) social discount rates, (iv) assumptions on non-CO2 greenhouse gas emissions and feasibility of carbon removals, and (v) constraints on the feasible speed of decarbonization (Hänsel et al, 2020) These improvements reconcile DICE results with the Paris targets, but do not consider the role of forest mitigation potential, as addressed in this paper. In addition to these structural issues with the DICE model, there is a wide range of fundamental uncertainty around critical parameters such as the cost of abatement technologies, timing of climate policy implementation, and productivity of the global economy. For each draw of a set of realizations of the underlying uncertain parameters, the optimization algorithm calculates the abatement, the corresponding CO2 price, and the present value of total abatement costs
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