An Incentive Mechanism for Reducing Emissions from Conversion of Intact and Non-intact Forests

This paper presents a new accounting mechanism in the context of the avoiding deforestation issue of the UNFCCC, including technical options for determining baselines of forest conversions. This proposal builds on the recent scientific achievements related to the estimation of tropical deforestation rates and to the assessment of ‘intact’ forest areas. The distinction between ‘intact’ and ‘non intact’ forests used here arises from experience with satellite-based deforestation measurements and allows accounting for carbon losses from forest degradation. The proposed accounting system would use forest area conversion rates as input data. An optimal technical solution to set baselines would be to use the time period from 1990 to 2005. The system introduces two different schemes to account for preserved carbon: one for countries with high forest conversion rates where the desired outcome would be a reduction in their rates, and another for countries with low rates. A global baseline rate would be used to discriminate between these two country categories (high and low rates). For the hypothetical accounting period 2013-2017 and considering 72% of the total tropical forest domain for which data are available, the scenario of a 10% reduction of the high rates and of the preservation of low rates would result in avoided emissions of approximately 1.6 billion tCO2 and a total of 2.9 billion tCO2 accountable preserved carbon.

MOLLICONE Danilo;  ACHARD Frederic;  FEDERICI Sandro;  EVA Hugh;  GRASSI Giacomo;  BELWARD Alan;  RAES Frank;  SEUFERT Guenther;  MATTEUCCI Giorgio;  SCHULZE Ernest Detlef; 

2007-07-11

SPRINGER

JRC34284

https://publications.jrc.ec.europa.eu/repository/handle/JRC34284,   

10.1007/s10584-006-9231-2,