Seeing the Forest and Saving the Trees: Tropical Land-Use Change and Global Climate Policy

Manuscript in Can Carbon Sinks Be Operational? Resources for the Future Discussion Paper no. 0126

Tropical forests are potentially large stores of carbon and can be used to reduce atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases. However their incorporation in global climate change policy is fraught with uncertainty because of the difficulties of designing policies to protect and enhance forests in developing countries.

This paper tackles the issues of international climate and land-use policy design. It provides an overview for the contribution to policy design of each of the later articles that deal in detail with remote sensing, ecology data needs, ecological modeling, economic modeling of land use and the implications of uncertainty