Motu Economic and Public Policy Research

publication search

You are here > Home / Publications / Deforestation, Carbon-Offsets and the Clean Development Mechanism

Deforestation, Carbon-Offsets and the Clean Development Mechanism

Document Format: Link

Publication Year: 2001

Abstract

The presentation will cover a range of issues of relevance for Costa Ricans interested in land use, carbon offsets and Kyoto’s Clean Development Mechanism. It will be broken into three parts. The first part will focus on the international context for including land use and carbon sequestration in the global climate mitigation effort: what is necessary to make an international system work. It will emphasize the need for land use projections, land use monitoring and carbon measurement on a broad spatial scale. I will also briefly discuss the difference between sequestration and storage, the problem of lack of permanence of offsets from forests relative to fossil fuel emissions reductions, and the problems that would arise if the rules exclude prevented deforestation from the CDM. The second part will present the results from our work in Costa Rica to show how a national level carbon baseline could be created for Costa Rica. We use economic theory to build a model. We estimate this model at a national scale using remote sensing data from 1963 through 1997, ecological data and socio-economic data from 1900 forward. We use this model to simulate future deforestation. This section will highlight some of the difficulties of baseline projection in a developing country. The third section will draw on previous presentations in this symposium to assess the types of uncertainty any international sequestration program will have to face. I will then discuss the costs and benefits of reducing that uncertainty and its implications for the CDM. Finally I will give some tentative conclusions about the implications of Kyoto for Costa Rica.

Citation

Kerr, Suzi. 2001. "Deforestation, Carbon-Offsets and the Clean Development Mechanism". Presentation (This presentation was presented at a Tinker Foundation Funded Symposium, February 19, 2001).

Motu code: MYS0028

JEL codes: