Feature articles

Saving forest carbon
Rewarding only the land managers who lower carbon emissions or store high carbon stocks.

IIASA researchers have designed and tested smarter rules to account for carbon that is absorbed and released through land management practices. The rules ensure that only practices that improve carbon management are rewarded—something that carbon accounting rules under the Kyoto Protocol have failed to do.

Any international climate change treaty, whether the Kyoto Protocol or a future agreement, needs a set of carbon accounting rules to determine how much carbon is not being released into the atmosphere as a result of climate-friendly activity. Carbon accounting is essential to incentivize countries, business, or people to take positive action to lower greenhouse gas emissions and to reward them accordingly.

PAST BEHAVIOR Carbon accounting should reflect both carbon absorbed by regenerating forests today and carbon released when areas were originally deforested. Photo: Hannes Böttcher

However, setting carbon accounting rules in the land use, land use change and forestry (LULUCF) sector is complex. The rules need to consider not just how people’s recent actions affect the amount of carbon a forest absorbs or releases, but also the impact of nature, climate, and, even more importantly, past practices.

The rules for forest management under the Kyoto Protocol account for the carbon balance of the ecosystem as it currently stands, but fail to distinguish what actually drives it. This leads to perverse incentives. For example, regenerating forests that have naturally high growth rates and are too young to be harvested absorb far more carbon from the atmosphere than they release, and are therefore rewarded under the Kyoto Protocol. However, old forests tend to contain high stocks of carbon and more frequently suffer natural disturbances, such as diseases or insect infestation, which release carbon from the forests. The Kyoto Protocol rules tend to penalize such forests.

Paradoxically, therefore, a country that has replanted forests it had previously overexploited is rewarded, whereas a country that has conserved its forests is penalized. Further, the carbon balance in both forest types is driven mainly by natural processes and therefore to a certain degree is predetermined. Thus land managers have relatively little influence. There are thus few incentives to improve current forest management practices.

To address such limitations, IIASA forestry researchers have tested and quantified the effects of alternative accounting rules. Their aim was to design rules that account for lower emissions and more storage of carbon and thereby provide incentives for improved management.

The researchers realized that they needed to isolate the effects that nature, climate, and past practices have on carbon stocks and emissions. They achieved this by building scientific modeling tools to calculate future carbon accounts for a reference scenario of a forest continually managed by a particular set of practices. The models were based on observations (e.g., forest inventory data), functions of tree growth, and assumptions on harvest rates.

By modeling and comparing different alternative management practices, the researchers were able to exclude natural and climatic effects and show only the effects of recent changes in management activity. Using this approach, a future international climate change agreement can ensure that rewards are issued only for management practices that increase stocks or lead to fewer emissions in comparison to the reference scenario. However, the challenge remains to design a robust and credible baseline for the reference scenario that would be agreeable to all countries.

Further information

Böttcher H, Kurz WA, Freibauer A (2008). Accounting of forest carbon sinks and sources under a future climate protocol: Factoring out past disturbance and management effects on age–class structure. Environmental Science & Policy 11(8):669–686.

Dr. Hannes Böttcher is a Research Scholar in IIASA’s Forestry Program.

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Last updated: 08 Jul 2010