Land-Use Displacement and Carbon Leakage from Forest Conservation

This thesis investigates the question how emissions from land-use displacement can be assessed and accounted for, using the example of carbon-leakage accounting in the planned UNFCCC mechanism on ‘Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation’ (REDD). REDD serves here as example of an international forest conservation policy that might be effective locally but could lead to displacement of deforestation to other countries. The first part of the thesis reviews existing accounting methods for land‐use displacement from different research fields and assesses their usefulness to quantify carbon leakage from REDD. Results show that it is very difficult to assess policy-induced (or strong) carbon leakage due to the requirement to demonstrate causal links between the policy in question and the observed land-use changes, especially at international scale. Other accounting methods focus on demand-driven (or weak) carbon leakage, by establishing a link between international trade flows and environmental impacts arising in the production of traded commodities, such as land use or land-use changes. Methods to quantify such distant linkages, or teleconnections, between production and consumption locations commonly combine land-use accounting with trade-flow assessments to link local land-use changes with global consumption. A methodological challenge is currently the quantification of emissions from landuse change arising from trade teleconnections. Responding to this shortcoming, in the second part of the thesis a new method is developed to assess these teleconnections. Coupled with trade-flow analysis, the ‘Land-Use Change Carbon Footprint’ (LUC-CFP) allows quantifying the extent to which land-use changes and associated emissions in a given country are due to the production of export goods, and thus the international demand for and consumption of forest-risk commodities. The understanding of such distant deforestation drivers can be useful in several contexts. Examples are the design of conservation policies like REDD, which risk being less effective as globalized deforestation drivers pose a high risk for international leakage, or the planning of demand-side measures that could complement supply-side action in decreasing global deforestation levels. Demand-side measures, such as zero-deforestation embargos, regulations or certification schemes, could eventually contribute to decrease the risk for international land-use displacement by addressing global consumption levels and commodity demand as one of the underlying driving forces of land-use change and deforestation.