Explore the vast range of titles available.

International initiatives for reducing carbon emissions from deforestation and forest degradation (REDD+) could make critical, cost-effective contributions to tropical countries’ nationally determined contributions (NDCs). Norway, a key donor of such initiatives, had a REDD+ partnership with Indonesia, offering results-based payments in exchange for emissions reductions calculated against a historical baseline. Central to this partnership was an area-based moratorium on new oil palm, timber, and logging concessions in primary and peatland forests. We evaluate the effectiveness of the moratorium between 2011 and 2018 by applying a matched triple difference strategy to a unique panel dataset. Treated dryland forest inside moratorium areas retained, at most, an average of 0.65% higher forest cover compared to untreated dryland forest outside the moratorium. By contrast, carbon-rich peatland forest was unaffected by the moratorium. Cumulative avoided dryland deforestation from 2011 until 2018 translates into 67.8 million to 86.9 million tons of emissions reductions, implying an effective carbon price below Norway’s US$5 per ton price. Based on Norway’s price, our estimated cumulative emissions reductions are equivalent to a payment of US$339 million to US$434.5 million. Annually, our estimates suggest a 3 to 4% contribution to Indonesia’s NDC commitment of a 29% emissions reduction by 2030. Despite the Indonesia–Norway partnership ending in 2021, reducing emissions from deforestation remains critical for meeting this commitment. Future area-based REDD+ initiatives could build on the moratorium’s outcomes by reforming its incentives and institutional arrangements, particularly in peatland forest areas.

The economic values of investing in long-term public projects are highly sensitive to the social discount rate (SDR). We surveyed over 200 experts to disentangle disagreement on the risk-free SDR into its component parts, including pure time preference, the wealth effect, and return to capital. We show that the majority of experts do not follow the simple Ramsey Rule, a widely used theoretical discounting framework, when recommending SDRs. Despite disagreement on discounting procedures and point values, we obtain a surprising degree of consensus among experts, with more than three-quarters finding the median risk-free SDR of 2 percent acceptable.

This paper provides novel empirical evidence on the value of the elasticity of marginal utility, \\[ \\eta \\], for the United Kingdom. \\[ \\eta \\] is a crucial component of the social discount rate (SDR), which determines the inter-temporal trade-offs that are acceptable to society. Using contemporaneous and historical data, new estimates are obtained using four revealed-preference techniques: the equal-sacrifice income tax approach, the Euler-equation approach, the Frisch additive-preferences approach and risk aversion in insurance markets. A meta-analysis indicates parameter homogeneity across approaches, and a central estimate of 1.5 for \\[ \\eta \\]. The confidence interval excludes unity, the value used in official guidance by the UK government. The term structure of the SDR is then estimated. The result is a short-run SDR of 4.5% declining to 4.2% in the very long-run. This is higher and flatter than the UK official guidance. The difference stems from incorrect calibration of social welfare and estimation of the diffusion of growth. Other things equal, the results suggest that current UK guidance might need to be updated.

The Dasgupta Review provides a rich overview of the economics of biodiversity, paints a bleak picture of the current state of biodiversity, and is a call to arms for action in anticipation of the CBD COP 15. The Review takes a global perspective aimed at the high level of international and national policy on biodiversity, while elucidating the very local nature of biodiversity threats and values. The approach is orthodox in its diagnosis via the language of externalities, natural capital, shadow pricing, asset returns, and the suite of remedial policies that follow. Yet, at its centre is an ‘unorthodox’ perspective: the economy is embedded in the environment and growth is limited. We offer reflections on this framing in light of its objectives for biodiversity. The limits to growth message will be criticised and applauded in equal measure by different economists. The central place of valuation and the aggregated concept of biodiversity will draw criticism from outside the discipline. Yet the Review provides a foundation for biodiversity economics, and its largely orthodox framing may invoke the intended step change in the mainstream approach to economic growth.

It is unclear how much carbon should be stored in temporary and risky offsets to compensate one ton of CO 2 emissions. Here we cast the social value of an offset (SVO), measured in terms of economic damages avoided, as a well-defined fraction of the social cost of carbon reflecting offset duration, and risks of non-additionality and failure. The SVO reflects the value of temporary storage, and overcomes shortcomings in the climate science and economics of previous contributions 1 – 4 . The SVO is policy relevant. An efficient net-zero policy will consist of offsets if their SVO/cost ratio exceeds the benefit/cost ratio of alternatives. The SVO yields an indicator of the equivalence of offsets to permanent carbon storage measured by the ratio of the SVO to the social cost of carbon. We provide a matrix of equivalence factors for different risks, permanence and climate scenarios. Estimation yields a rule of thumb: one offset sequestering one ton for 50 years is equivalent to between 0.33 and 0.5 tons permanently locked away. Equivalence offers a means of replacing perpetual offset contracts by simpler, easy to monitor short-term contracts, has applications to carbon life cycle analysis 5 and the valuation of carbon debts 6 , and can be the basis of comparing offsets of different qualities in the voluntary and compliance markets. An analysis proposes the social value of offsets to measure the amount of carbon that should be stored in temporary and risky offsets to compensate one ton of CO 2 emissions.

Societal Impact Statement Humankind is facing both climate and biodiversity crises. This article proposes the foundations of a scheme that offers tradable credits for combined aboveground and soil carbon and biodiversity. Multidiversity—as estimated based on high‐throughput molecular identification of soil meiofauna, fungi, bacteria, protists, plants and other organisms shedding DNA into soil, complemented by acoustic and video analyses of aboveground macrobiota—offers a cost‐effective method that captures much of the terrestrial biodiversity. Such a voluntary crediting system would increase the quality of carbon projects and contribute funding for delivering the Kunming‐Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework. Summary Carbon crediting and land offsets for biodiversity protection have been developed to tackle the challenges of increasing greenhouse gas emissions and the loss of global biodiversity. Unfortunately, these two mechanisms are not optimal when considered separately. Focusing solely on carbon capture—the primary goal of most carbon‐focused crediting and offsetting commitments—often results in the establishment of non‐native, fast‐growing monocultures that negatively affect biodiversity and soil‐related ecosystem services. Soil contributes a vast proportion of global biodiversity and contains traces of aboveground organisms. Here, we outline a carbon and biodiversity co‐crediting scheme based on the multi‐kingdom molecular and carbon analyses of soil samples, along with remote sensing estimation of aboveground carbon as well as video and acoustic analyses‐based monitoring of aboveground macroorganisms. Combined, such a co‐crediting scheme could help halt biodiversity loss by incentivising industry and governments to account for biodiversity in carbon sequestration projects more rigorously, explicitly and equitably than they currently do. In most cases, this would help prioritise protection before restoration and help promote more socially and environmentally sustainable land stewardship towards a ‘nature positive’ future. Inimkond ägab nii kliima‐ kui ka elurikkuse kriiside all. Selles artiklis pakume välja kaubeldava süsiniku ja elurikkuse kooskrediteerimise skeemi, kus eri organismirühmade (selgrootud loomad, seened, bakterid, protistid, taimed) kaalutud liigirikkus mullaproovides on peamine elurikkuse näitaja. Molekulaarsete meetodite abil läbiviidud mulla DNA uuringud koos video ja akustilise materjaliga võimaldavad kulutõhusalt hinnata kogu ökosüsteemi elurikkust. Siin väljapakutud kooskrediteerimise põhimõte võimaldab tõhustada süsinikuprojekte ja rahastada looduskaitset. Humankind is facing both climate and biodiversity crises. This article proposes the foundations of a scheme that offers tradable credits for combined aboveground and soil carbon and biodiversity. Multidiversity—as estimated based on high‐throughput molecular identification of soil meiofauna, fungi, bacteria, protists, plants and other organisms shedding DNA into soil, complemented by acoustic and video analyses of aboveground macrobiota—offers a cost‐effective method that captures much of the terrestrial biodiversity. Such a voluntary crediting system would increase the quality of carbon projects and contribute funding for delivering the Kunming‐Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework.

The value of climate change mitigation largely depends on the social discount rate, which has almost exclusively been influenced by economists. A survey of expert philosophers shows that, as a group, they support the same social discount rate as economists, resulting in the same mitigation policy, but for different ethical and practical reasons.

We outline the principles of the natural capital approach to decision making and apply these to the contemporary challenge of very significantly expanding woodlands as contribution to attaining net zero emissions of greenhouse gases. Drawing on the case of the UK, we argue that a single focus upon carbon storage alone is likely to overlook the other ‘net zero plus’ benefits which woodlands can deliver. A review of the literature considers the wide variety of potential benefits which woodlands can provide, together with costs such as foregone alternative land uses. We argue that decision making must consider all of these potential benefits and costs for the right locations to be planted with the right trees. The paper closes by reviewing the decision support systems necessary to incorporate this information into policy and decision making. Read the free Plain Language Summary for this article on the Journal blog. Read the free Plain Language Summary for this article on the Journal blog.

The effectiveness of adaptation strategies is crucial for reducing the costs of climate change. Using plot-level data from a specifically designed survey conducted in Pakistan, we investigate the productive benefits for farmers who adapt to climate change. The impact of implementing on-farm adaptation strategies is estimated separately for two staple crops: wheat and rice. We employ propensity score matching and endogenous switching regressions to account for the possibility that farmers self-select into adaptation. Estimated productivity gains are positive and significant for rice farmers who adapted, but negligible for wheat. Counterfactual gains for non-adapters were significantly positive, which is potentially a sign of transactions costs to adaptation. Other factors associated with adaptation were formal credit and extension, underscoring the importance of addressing institutional and informational constraints that inhibit farmers from improving their farming practices. The findings provide evidence for the Pakistani Planning and Development Department's ongoing assessment of climate-related agricultural losses.

Efforts to avert dangerous climate change by conserving and restoring natural habitats are hampered by concerns over the credibility of methods used to quantify their long-term impacts. Here we develop a flexible framework for estimating the net social benefit of impermanent nature-based interventions that integrates three substantial advances: (1) conceptualizing the permanence of a project’s impact as its additionality over time; (2) risk-averse estimation of the social cost of future reversals of carbon gains; and (3) post-credit monitoring to correct errors in deliberately pessimistic release forecasts. Our framework generates incentives for safeguarding already credited carbon while enabling would-be investors to make like-for-like comparisons of diverse carbon projects. Preliminary analyses suggest nature-derived credits may be competitively priced even after adjusting for impermanence.Nature-based solutions are essential to avoid climate crisis, yet how best to estimate their long-run effects is unclear. Here the authors propose a new dynamic accounting method that captures the impermanence of these carbon impacts, allowing investors to make robust comparisons across projects.