Forestry Offsets Research Articles

Forestry offsets under China’s certificated emission reduction (CCER) for carbon neutrality: regulatory gaps and the ways forward

PurposeAs a typical nature-based solution to climate change, forestry carbon sinks are vital to achieving carbon neutrality in China. However, regulations in China are insufficient to promote the development of carbon offset projects in forestry. This study aims to identify the regulatory obstacles impeding the development of forestry offsets under China’s certified emission reduction (CCER) and explore ways to improve the regulatory system.Design/methodology/approachThis study conducts a qualitative analysis using a normative legal research method. This study conducted a synthetic review of national and local regulatory documents to gain insights into the regulatory landscape of forestry offsets in China. The main contents and characteristics of these documents are illustrated. Furthermore, related secondary literature was reviewed to gain further insight into forestry offset regulations and to identify significant gaps in China’s CCER regulation.FindingsForestry offset regulations under the CCER are characterized by fragmentation and a relatively lower legally binding force. There is no systematic institutional arrangement for forestry offset development, impeding market expectations and increasing transaction costs. The main challenges in China’s regulation of forestry carbon sinks include entitlement ambiguity, complicated rules for registration and verification, a lack of mechanisms for incentives, risk prevention and biodiversity protection.Originality/valueForestry carbon sinks’ multiple environmental and social values necessitate their effective development and utilization. This study assessed forestry offset regulations in China and proposed corresponding institutional arrangements to improve forestry carbon sink regulations under the CCER.

Canada’s Green Gold: Unveiling Challenges, Opportunities, and Pathways for Sustainable Forestry Offsets

Forestry offsets, recognized for their diverse environmental and social co-benefits, are gaining a growing interest as nature-based solutions to combat climate change. Despite Canada’s extensive forest resources, its potential for carbon credit remains largely untapped. This study aims to unveil the prevailing challenges in developing forestry offsets in Canada and propose potential solutions, drawing on insights from in-depth semi-structured interviews (SSIs) with 23 experts in the field. A qualitative thematic analysis highlighted 14 challenges under four major frequently discussed themes: methodological (37%), social (29%), economic (22%), and implementation challenges (12%). Our findings highlighted the urgency of addressing key obstacles, including the impermanent nature of forestry carbon offsets, substantial public knowledge gaps, uncertainties in the cost-effectiveness impacting financial viability, and the need for enhanced capacity for project implementation. Building on the discussions on the identified challenges, this study further presented a comprehensive analysis of the future directions for Canada, emphasizing the importance of addressing key methodological issues, enhancing public and Indigenous education and engagement, and leveraging advanced technologies and innovative approaches like ton-year accounting for economic viability. This paper delivers pivotal insights that have the potential to shape the direction and integrity of the forestry offset markets in both Canada and globally.

Climate rentierism after coal: forests, carbon offsets, and post-coal politics in the Appalachian coalfields

ABSTRACT The central Appalachian coalfields have become a major site of carbon forestry offsets on California's carbon market. I use these coalfields as a vantage point from which to examine the emerging dynamics of climate change and rentier capitalism in the rural Global North. Studying one valley on the Kentucky-Tennessee border where coal mining has largely ended, I document how emergent land uses take the form of rentier capitalism. I conclude that rentier dynamics articulated with deindustrialization have created the conditions for right-wing populism to emerge, in part in response to the experience of becoming ‘surplus population,’ drawing upon Tania Li's framework.

Inclusion of forestry offsets in emission trading schemes: insights from global experts

Emissions trading schemes (ETSs) have been a central component of international climate change policies, as a carbon pricing tool to achieve emissions reduction targets. Forest carbon offset credits have been leveraged in many ETSs to efficiently meet emission reduction targets, yet there is little knowledge about the perceptions, experiences, and challenges associated with the forest carbon offsetting in existing and pilot ETS. Given that the future inclusion of forest carbon offset in ETS management activities and policies will require strong support and acceptability among the institutions and experts involved in ETS, this study explores the experiences and lessons learned with 16 globally engaging experts representing major existing ETSs (North America, Europe, and New Zealand) and Chinese pilot ETSs towards the inclusion of forestry offsets, major concerns and challenges with existing implementation models. Findings revealed that many respondents particularly from North America, New Zealand, and Chinese pilot systems portrayed positive attitudes toward the inclusion of forestry carbon offsets and its role in contributing to a viable ETS, while European experts were not supportive. Respondents cited leakage, permanence, additionality, and monitoring design features as the major challenges and concerns that inhibit the expansion and inclusion of forest carbon offsetting. Respondents from Chinese pilot schemes referenced a unique set of challenges related to implementation, including the increasing cost of afforestation and reforestation projects, the uncertainty in the future supply and demand for their national Certified Emissions Reduction (CER) scheme and landowner engagement. Existing and future ETSs should learn from and address the challenges experienced by global experts and carbon pricing mechanisms to design, evaluate, or enhance their forest carbon offset programs for an effective and viable system that successfully contributes to GHG mitigation practices globally. We recommend inclusion of forest carbon offsets at the early stages of ETS improves the perceptions and experience of policy makers and practitioners toward the success and potential of forestry offsets in ETS ensuring familiarity and confidence in the mechanism.

Reprint of ‘Yes-in-my-backyard’: Spatial differences in the valuation of forest services and local co-benefits for carbon markets in México

Forests provide many and large benefits, including cost-efficient climate change mitigation. However international carbon markets have not stimulated the demand for forestry offsets. Domestic market-mechanisms are emerging in many countries and forests could be highly valued through these policies as most of the benefits produced by forests are enjoyed locally. Here, a choice experiment explores drivers of valuation and willingness to pay for forest carbon services in voluntary markets in Mexico by comparing the valuation of citizens from four regions to test geographical preference for projects (n=645). Findings from multinomial-logit models show valuation of forest carbon services is transferable and citizens would pay more for offsets from projects closer to their homes. Proximate forests provide a range of co-benefits to local users, including environmental services and opportunities for recreation. Factors related to valuation include sense of responsibility, previous knowledge of carbon emissions, previous visits to the sites, regional identification and the valuation of local environmental services (e.g. improvements in local air quality). Knowledge of spatial heterogeneity in valuation of the use of forest services can help to design market-based instruments by identifying highly valued areas for environmental services programs and carbon markets.

‘Yes-in-my-backyard’: Spatial differences in the valuation of forest services and local co-benefits for carbon markets in México

Forests provide many and large benefits, including cost-efficient climate change mitigation. However international carbon markets have not stimulated the demand for forestry offsets. Domestic market-mechanisms are emerging in many countries and forests could be highly valued through these policies as most of the benefits produced by forests are enjoyed locally. Here, a choice experiment explores drivers of valuation and willingness to pay for forest carbon services in voluntary markets in Mexico by comparing the valuation of citizens from four regions to test geographical preference for projects (n=645). Findings from multinomial-logit models show valuation of forest carbon services is transferable and citizens would pay more for offsets from projects closer to their homes. Proximate forests provide a range of co-benefits to local users, including environmental services and opportunities for recreation. Factors related to valuation include sense of responsibility, previous knowledge of carbon emissions, previous visits to the sites, regional identification and the valuation of local environmental services (e.g. improvements in local air quality). Knowledge of spatial heterogeneity in valuation of the use of forest services can help to design market-based instruments by identifying highly valued areas for environmental services programs and carbon markets.

Tracking the Fault Lines of Pro‐Poor Carbon Forestry

AbstractReducing emissions from deforestation and forest degradation (REDD) has been given a principal role in post‐Kyoto, climate change agreements. Resulting markets and mechanisms for carbon forestry offsets could generate considerable global revenues for both forest conservation and sustainable rural development; or they may impose political and economic pressures on forest governance that threaten indigenous and rural peoples’ rights. Some inherent challenges to developing carbon forestry projects that support rural peoples’ welfare are reviewed. The experience of Scolel Te’, a carbon forestry project for Mexican indigenous farmers, suggests how projects can be adapted for smallholder provision of carbon services on benign terms and still meet the demands of carbon markets. However, carbon sales alone have not supported investments in knowledge development, institutional learning, and strategic farmer participation needed for significant political or economic change. This supports critiques that policies based on economic valuations of environmental services are unlikely to support social and equity objectives.

Realizing Carbon's Value: Discourse and Calculation in the Production of Carbon Forestry Offsets in Costa Rica

: This article examines the relation between discourse and value in the production of a carbon forestry offset project among indigenous smallholders in Costa Rica. By analyzing a pivotal cost–benefit calculation that changed the trajectory of the project, this article makes two principal claims. First, the intelligibility of the calculation is grounded in a discursive formation that is emergent from a history of development projects in the region, where particular ways of speaking about the relation between indigenous bodies and agriculture have allowed carbon's commodification to emerge as a desirable project. Second, the calculations resulted in quantified representations of space that were necessary for the offset to become useful within the framework of the Kyoto Protocol. In this case, the forestry offset's use value derived from quantified representations of agricultural space; a process that opened some forms of land use for receiving carbon while foreclosing on others.

Carbon's Calculatory Spaces: The Emergence of Carbon Offsets in Costa Rica

This paper analyzes the practices of calculation needed to create carbon forestry offsets in Costa Rica, paying special attention to the spaces that are produced through such practices. I argue that the calculations needed to bring a carbon offset into being as a commodity is a process that results in the coconstitution of relational space, absolute Cartesian spaces, and the bounded territory of the nation-state. I develop my argument by drawing on Martin Heidegger's writings on calculation, technology, and the question of being and examine the spaces that result from carbon offset calculations performed by the Costa Rican state. Central to my argument is the idea that the practices of calculation are productive of a technological metaphysics, where the world becomes disclosed to us as an object of orderability. This ontological orientation allows for the objects and subjects of the world, in this case carbon commodities as well as producers and consumers of carbon offsets, to become relationally embedded in the world through the production of bounded Cartesian space. The production of such ‘graspable’ spaces simultaneously reinforces and undermines the territoriality of the Costa Rican state.

Foresty offsets in emissions trading systems: a link between systems?

An important aspect in the linking of different emissions trading schemes is the degree to which these systems allow (or ban) external offset project categories. The EU Emission Trading Scheme (EU ETS) currently allows the use of credits from energy and industry projects developed under the Kyoto Protocol’s Joint Implementation (JI) and Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) but excludes the use of carbon credits from forestry projects for compliance in the EU ETS. Forestry credits generated by the CDM have a limited lifetime and expire at the end of a project’s crediting period, or earlier if the carbon stock for which the credits have been issued ceases to exist. According to the recently adopted amendment of the EU ETS Directive forestry credits will remain to be excluded until 2020. The present article reviews how the New South Wales Greenhouse Gas Abatement Scheme (Australia), the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (US) and the voluntary scheme of the Chicago Climate Exchange integrate forestry offsets into the respective system and how they deal with the risk of losing stored and credited biomass. By comparing the results of different scenarios this article shows how differences in the treatment of forestry offsets could impact the efforts to link various emission trading systems in future.

Forest Management and Climate Change Mitigation: Good Policy Requires Careful Thought

Abstract Many people believe that forest management and the production of forest products can be important tools in a climate change mitigation strategy. This article critically examines how forest management can contribute to climate change mitigation in the global context, and it examines four major issues that must be considered before developing a strategy that would achieve real contributions. The article argues that protection of the carbon stock in the existing natural forest should be the central management objective related to carbon. Second should be the development of a widely accepted standard for calculating forestry offsets to drive future private investment on private forests. The article concludes with some recommendations for policy setting.

Integrating Forestry Offsets into a Domestic EmissionTrading Scheme in Korea

Integrating Forestry Offsets into a Domestic EmissionTrading Scheme in Korea

Carbon Offsets: Growing Pains in a Growing Market

There’s a market growing in the United States, but unlike markets that trade in tangible commodities, this one trades in the absence of something no one wants: greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. Hundreds of companies make it possible for individuals, organizations, businesses, and even events such as rock music festivals to proclaim themselves carbon-neutral by paying someone else to reduce their emissions. Worried about your carbon footprint? No problem. For fees of US$2–50 per ton of “avoided emissions,” an offset provider will funnel your money into an activity or technology that keeps greenhouse gases out of the atmosphere. The question is, are offset buyers really getting what they paid for?

The ‘hidden’ social costs of forestry offsets

The article quantifies the size of ‘hidden’ social costs that are incurred by forestry offsets in the voluntary market that promise to offset present emissions sometime in the future. It does this by estimating the difference between the social costs of carbon (C) emitted and of costs offset by removal of C from the atmosphere by reforestation/afforestation. All current attempts to make forestry offsets more reliable focus on quality control rather than the mismatch of the timing of emissions and their offset. Recommendations that follow from the analysis are twofold. First, that markets for carbon dioxide equivalent (CO2e) removals by voluntary offsets should be confined to the annual incremental removals actually achieved. Second, the promoters of voluntary offsets projects should declare the annual stream of carbon credits and debits expected so that buyers can place a present value on such projects.