Abstract
A high risk of overestimating emission reductions would be detrimental to the credibility of forest mitigation. But high-quality information on uncertainties in measuring emissions from forests is hard to obtain because of frequent shortcomings in uncertainty analyses. This paper aims to gauge what precision is achievable by examining data from several contexts (including data from 18 countries that have proposed jurisdictional mitigation programmes to the Forest Carbon Partnership Facility Carbon Fund). Countries reported random uncertainties in measuring forest carbon density (mostly 5–15% of the mean at the 90% confidence level), forest areas and their changes (mostly 0–20% for forest loss and forest degradation and 10–40% for forest gain), and greenhouse gas emissions (mostly 10–30%). It follows that uncertainties may be substantial in estimating emission reductions from forests and land-use change, and that these uncertainties entail significant risks of overestimation. I propose discount factors (between 9 and 44%) to conservatively adjust emission reduction estimates and reduce the overestimation risk. The paper concludes by pointing out that uncertainties are much lower for aggregate emission reductions of several programmes than they are for individual programmes. Discounting individual programmes’ emission reductions could therefore lead to understating the mitigation contribution that forests deliver.
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Acknowledgements
Several experts have been available to me for technical discussions that have helped improve my thinking: Andrés B. Espejo, Cecilia Simon, Donna Lee, Javier García G., Lucio Pedroni, Marco van der Linden, Marieke Sandker, Manuel Estrada P., Sandro Federici, and Timothy Pearson. I am indebted to Ruth D. Yanai and one anonymous reviewer who have provided valuable feedback on the manuscript.
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I have no financial interests to declare. This research was conducted approximately since 2017 when working on a series of consultancies for several organizations active in the field: The United Nation’s Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), the World Bank, Winrock International, and Verra, which operates the Verified Carbon Standard. All of these assignments are now concluded.
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Neeff, T. What is the risk of overestimating emission reductions from forests – and what can be done about it?. Climatic Change 166, 26 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10584-021-03079-z
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10584-021-03079-z