Modeling the Economics of Greenhouse Gas Mitigation Summary of a Workshop (2011) / Chapter Skim
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Carbon Offsets in Forest and Land Use--Brent Sohngen
Carbon Offsets in Forest and Land Use--Brent Sohngen
Pages 100-108
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From page 100... ...
If, as their promoters suggest, forest carbon offsets cost less than options in the energy sector, they may be able to reduce the overall costs of climate mitigation to society. Some studies have suggested that forestry carbon offsets can reduce the costs of stringent carbon mitigation policies by up to 40% (Tavoni et al., 2007; Sohngen, 2009)
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From page 101... ...
The benefit of this approach is that as carbon sequestration policies are modeled, they have impacts on overall land use, which impacts output prices and resource costs. These are modeled explicitly in optimization approaches, allowing direct calculation of the opportunity costs of shifting land from one use to another.
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From page 102... ...
, unless otherwise noted. Cost estimates include opportunity costs, and implementation and management costs, but not measuring, monitoring, and verification costs, and other transactions costs.
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From page 103... ...
The USDA Forest Service Forest Inventory and Analysis database (http://www.fia.fs.fed.us/) provides fairly accurate information on the stock of forests in the United States at a given time, and it is available freely to everyone via the Internet.
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From page 104... ...
FIGURE C.17 Carbon prices and annual forest carbon sequestration in the optimal scenario of Sohngen (2009) with and Appendix C - Sohngen - Figure 2.eps without transaction costs.
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From page 105... ...
come from actual carbon sequestration projects, so they likely reflect the relatively large costs of putting infrastructure in place to do measurements where it was not in place before. In reality, society will ultimately need both sorts of measurements, i.e., national scale systems that are rela tively cheap on a per hectare basis, but which provide overall information on the direction and scale of carbon stocks, as well as specific surveys of forests that have been included in a "carbon project." Obviously, individuals who buy carbon offset credits from specific locations have great interest in knowing whether the carbon actually resides in those locations (not to mention the interest society has in knowing this)
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From page 106... ...
Transaction costs do have important implications for carbon sequestration in carbon policy in that total sequestration is projected to be lower, but these transactions costs do not suggest that the level of carbon sequestration should be zero. Additionality and Leakage Much is made of additionality.
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From page 107... ...
2007. Assessing transaction costs of project-based greenhouse gas emissions trading.
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From page 108... ...
2006. Global Forest Resources Assessment 2005: Progress towards sustainable forest management.
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