IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/ehl/lserod/54192.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Uncertain emission reductions from forest conservation: REDD in the Bale mountains, Ethiopia

Author

Listed:
  • Watson, Charlene
  • Mourato, Susana
  • Milner-Gulland, E. J.

Abstract

The environmental integrity of a mechanism rewarding Reduced Emissions from Deforestation and Degradation (REDD) depends on appropriate accounting for emission reductions. Largely stemming from a lack of forest data in developing countries, emission reductions accounting contains substantial uncertainty as a result of forest carbon stock estimates, where the application of biome-averaged data over large forest areas is commonplace. Using a case study in the Bale Mountains in Ethiopia, we exemplify the implications of primary and secondary forest carbon stock estimates on predicted REDD project emission reductions and revenues. Primary data estimate area-weighted mean forest carbon stock of 195 tC/ha ± 81, and biomeaveraged data reported by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change underestimate forest carbon stock in the Bale Mountains by as much as 63% in moist forest and 58% in dry forest. Combining forest carbon stock estimates and uncertainty in voluntary carbon market prices demonstrates the financial impact of uncertainty: potential revenues over the 20-year project ranged between US$9 million and US$185 million. Estimated revenues will influence decisions to implement a project or not and may have profound implications for the level of benefit sharing that can be supported. Strong financial incentives exist to improve forest carbon stock estimates in tropical forests, as well as the environmental integrity of REDD projects.

Suggested Citation

  • Watson, Charlene & Mourato, Susana & Milner-Gulland, E. J., 2013. "Uncertain emission reductions from forest conservation: REDD in the Bale mountains, Ethiopia," LSE Research Online Documents on Economics 54192, London School of Economics and Political Science, LSE Library.
    • Handle: RePEc:ehl:lserod:54192
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/54192/
    File Function: Open access version.
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Tol, Richard S. J., 2008. "The Social Cost of Carbon: Trends, Outliers and Catastrophes," Economics - The Open-Access, Open-Assessment E-Journal (2007-2020), Kiel Institute for the World Economy (IfW Kiel), vol. 2, pages 1-22.
    2. Hepburn, Cameron J. & Koundouri, Phoebe, 2007. "Recent advances in discounting: Implications for forest economics," Journal of Forest Economics, Elsevier, vol. 13(2-3), pages 169-189, August.
    3. Ben Groom & Cameron Hepburn & Phoebe Koundouri & David Pearce, 2005. "Declining Discount Rates: The Long and the Short of it," Environmental & Resource Economics, Springer;European Association of Environmental and Resource Economists, vol. 32(4), pages 445-493, December.
    4. Weitzman, Martin L., 1998. "Why the Far-Distant Future Should Be Discounted at Its Lowest Possible Rate," Journal of Environmental Economics and Management, Elsevier, vol. 36(3), pages 201-208, November.
    5. Skutsch, Margaret M. & Ba, Libasse, 2010. "Crediting carbon in dry forests: The potential for community forest management in West Africa," Forest Policy and Economics, Elsevier, vol. 12(4), pages 264-270, April.
    6. Suzi Kerr & Joanna Hendy & Shuguang Liu & Alexander S. P. Pfaff, 2004. "Tropical Forest Protection, Uncertainty, and the Environmental Integrity of Carbon Mitigation Policies," Working Papers 04_03, Motu Economic and Public Policy Research.
    7. Hayes, Tanya & Persha, Lauren, 2010. "Nesting local forestry initiatives: Revisiting community forest management in a REDD+ world," Forest Policy and Economics, Elsevier, vol. 12(8), pages 545-553, October.
    8. Stern,Nicholas, 2007. "The Economics of Climate Change," Cambridge Books, Cambridge University Press, number 9780521700801, January.
    9. David Pearce & Ben Groom & Cameron Hepburn & Phoebe Koundouri, 2003. "Valuing the Future," World Economics, World Economics, 1 Ivory Square, Plantation Wharf, London, United Kingdom, SW11 3UE, vol. 4(2), pages 121-141, April.
    10. Cacho, Oscar J. & Marshall, Graham R. & Milne, Mary, 2005. "Transaction and abatement costs of carbon-sink projects in developing countries," Environment and Development Economics, Cambridge University Press, vol. 10(5), pages 597-614, October.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Till Neeff, 2021. "What is the risk of overestimating emission reductions from forests – and what can be done about it?," Climatic Change, Springer, vol. 166(1), pages 1-19, May.
    2. Wells, Geoff & Fisher, Janet A. & Porras, Ina & Staddon, Sam & Ryan, Casey, 2017. "Rethinking Monitoring in Smallholder Carbon Payments for Ecosystem Service Schemes: Devolve Monitoring, Understand Accuracy and Identify Co-benefits," Ecological Economics, Elsevier, vol. 139(C), pages 115-127.

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Winkler, Ralph, 2009. "Now or Never: Environmental Protection under Hyperbolic Discounting," Economics - The Open-Access, Open-Assessment E-Journal (2007-2020), Kiel Institute for the World Economy (IfW Kiel), vol. 3, pages 1-22.
    2. Roger Fouquet, 2012. "Economics of Energy and Climate Change: Origins, Developments and Growth," Working Papers 2012-08, BC3.
    3. Jouini, Elyès & Marin, Jean-Michel & Napp, Clotilde, 2010. "Discounting and divergence of opinion," Journal of Economic Theory, Elsevier, vol. 145(2), pages 830-859, March.
    4. Price, Colin, 2018. "Declining discount rate and the social cost of carbon: Forestry consequences," Journal of Forest Economics, Elsevier, vol. 31(C), pages 39-45.
    5. Fesselmeyer, Eric & Liu, Haoming & Salvo, Alberto, 2016. "How Do Households Discount over Centuries? Evidence from Singapore's Private Housing Market," IZA Discussion Papers 9862, Institute of Labor Economics (IZA).
    6. Geoffrey Heal & Antony Millner, 2013. "Discounting under disagreement," GRI Working Papers 112, Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment.
    7. Aline Chiabai & Ibon Galarraga & Anil Markandya & Unai Pascual, 2013. "The Equivalency Principle for Discounting the Value of Natural Assets: An Application to an Investment Project in the Basque Coast," Environmental & Resource Economics, Springer;European Association of Environmental and Resource Economists, vol. 56(4), pages 535-550, December.
    8. Phoebe Koundouri & Georgios I. Papayiannis & Electra V. Petracou & Athanasios N. Yannacopoulos, 2023. "Consensus group decision making under model uncertainty with a view towards environmental policy making," Papers 2312.00436, arXiv.org.
    9. Jamison Dean T. & Jamison Julian, 2011. "Characterizing the Amount and Speed of Discounting Procedures," Journal of Benefit-Cost Analysis, De Gruyter, vol. 2(2), pages 1-56, April.
    10. Stefano Giglio & Matteo Maggiori & Johannes Stroebel, 2016. "No‐Bubble Condition: Model‐Free Tests in Housing Markets," Econometrica, Econometric Society, vol. 84, pages 1047-1091, May.
    11. Jouini, Elyès & Napp, Clotilde, 2014. "How to aggregate experts' discount rates: An equilibrium approach," Economic Modelling, Elsevier, vol. 36(C), pages 235-243.
    12. Kollenberg, Sascha & Taschini, Luca, 2016. "Emissions trading systems with cap adjustments," Journal of Environmental Economics and Management, Elsevier, vol. 80(C), pages 20-36.
    13. Dorje C. Brody & Lane P. Hughston, 2013. "Social Discounting and the Long Rate of Interest," Papers 1306.5145, arXiv.org, revised Sep 2015.
    14. Cees A. Withagen, 2018. "The Social Cost of Carbon and the Ramsey Rule," CESifo Working Paper Series 7359, CESifo.
    15. Barry Anderson & Emanuele Borgonovo & Marzio Galeotti & Roberto Roson, 2014. "Uncertainty in Climate Change Modeling: Can Global Sensitivity Analysis Be of Help?," Risk Analysis, John Wiley & Sons, vol. 34(2), pages 271-293, February.
    16. William Nordhaus, 2014. "Estimates of the Social Cost of Carbon: Concepts and Results from the DICE-2013R Model and Alternative Approaches," Journal of the Association of Environmental and Resource Economists, University of Chicago Press, vol. 1(1), pages 000.
    17. Sjølie, Hanne K. & Latta, Greg S. & Solberg, Birger, 2013. "Dual discounting in climate change mitigation in the forest sector," Journal of Forest Economics, Elsevier, vol. 19(4), pages 416-431.
    18. Rob Aalbers, 2009. "Discounting investments in mitigation and adaptation: a dynamic stochastic general equilibrium approach of climate change," CPB Discussion Paper 126, CPB Netherlands Bureau for Economic Policy Analysis.
    19. Dean T. Jamison & Julian Jamison, 2010. "Characterizing the amount and speed of discounting procedures," Working Papers 10-14, Federal Reserve Bank of Boston.
    20. Birol, Ekin & Koundouri, Phoebe & Kountouris, Yiannis, 2010. "Assessing the economic viability of alternative water resources in water-scarce regions: Combining economic valuation, cost-benefit analysis and discounting," Ecological Economics, Elsevier, vol. 69(4), pages 839-847, February.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    deforestation; emission reductions accounting; Ethiopia; forest carbon stocks; REDD; uncertainty;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • J1 - Labor and Demographic Economics - - Demographic Economics

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:ehl:lserod:54192. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: LSERO Manager (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/lsepsuk.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.