Abstract
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.
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Notes
The CAR forest protocol is in the process of being revised as of the drafting of this article. The latest draft of the protocol available to the authors at the time of submission (version 3.0, June 22, 2009) represents a significant shift from the CAR protocol evaluated herein. Preliminary analysis suggests that if implemented in its current form, an updated CAR forest management protocol all-pools scenario would generate average annual creditable C values approximately midway between the HFF and current CAR protocol explored here but with greater potential variability. Significantly less creditable C is generated by the draft version than the current CAR protocol when limiting the analysis to only required pools, with the draft protocol again exhibiting greater variability than the current version.
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Acknowledgments
This analysis was largely supported by the Climate Change Policy Partnership at Duke University. The authors also wish to thank the USDA Forest Service forest managers at Sumter National Forest for their continued support of the long-term soil and ecosystem research being conducted at the Calhoun Experimental Forest.
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Galik, C.S., Mobley, M.L. & deB. Richter, D. A virtual “field test” of forest management carbon offset protocols: the influence of accounting. Mitig Adapt Strateg Glob Change 14, 677–690 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11027-009-9190-9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11027-009-9190-9