International Forest Carbon Sequestration in a Post-Kyoto Agreement

Given the size of the global carbon pool in forest vegetation, the potential climatic effects of natural and anthropogenic changes in forests are enormous. Therefore, forest carbon management must be an important element of any international agreement on climate change. In this regard, the Kyoto Protocol has proven ineffective, in part, due to its emphasis on project-based evaluation and the absence of a mechanism for compensating avoided deforestation. We consider alternative ways to include forest carbon management within the framework of an international climate treaty. We conclude that project-by-project accounting, as under the Clean Development Mechanism of the Kyoto Protocol, is fundamentally flawed due to problems with additionality, leakage, and permanence. We find that national-level accounting linked to an emissions trading program offers much more promise. Under the national inventory (NI) approach, nations conduct periodic inventories of their entire forest carbon stock. The measured stock is compared to a negotiated baseline stock to determine the number of credits to redeem (or debits to cover) in the permit market. The NI approach is more comprehensive than, and addresses some of the incentive problems with, recent proposals for compensating reductions in tropical deforestation (e.g., REDD). For the NI approach to succeed, it must be feasible to conduct regular and reliable national forest inventories for a large group of countries. If current measurement technologies are inadequate, we recommend that an input-based approach be used in the interim until the measurement challenges are overcome. International Forest Carbon Sequestration in a Post-Kyoto Agreement Andrew J. Plantinga and Kenneth R. Richards