Journal Article

A virtual “field test” of forest management carbon offset protocols: the influence of accounting

deB. Richter, Daniel, Mobley, Megan L., Galik, Christopher S.

2009

Overview

Of the greenhouse gas (GHG) mitigation options available from U.S. forests and agricultural lands, forest management presents amongst the lowest cost and highest volume opportunities. A number of carbon (C) accounting schemes or protocols have recently emerged to track the mitigation achieved by individual forest management projects. Using 50-year C cycling data from the Calhoun Experimental Forest in South Carolina, USA, C storage is estimated for a hypothetical forest management C offset project operating under seven of these protocols. After 100 years of project implementation, net C sequestration among the seven protocols varies by nearly a full order of magnitude. This variation stems from differences in how individual C pools, baseline, leakage, certainty, and buffers are addressed under each protocol. This in turn translates to a wide variation in the C price required to match the net present value of the non-project, business-as-usual alternative. Collectively, these findings suggest that protocol-specific restrictions or requirements are likely to discount the amount of C that can be claimed in “real world” projects, potentially leading to higher project costs than estimated in previous aggregate national analyses.

• Publisher: Springer Netherlands,Springer Nature B.V
• Subject: Accounting / Agricultural land / Atmospheric Sciences / Carbon offsets / Carbon sequestration / Climate change / Climate Change Management and Policy / Climate policy / Earth and Environmental Science / Earth Sciences / Environmental accounting / Environmental Management / Environmental policy / Environmental protection / Farm buildings / Forest management / Greenhouse gases / Mitigation / Original Article / Protocol / Studies