HR: 0800h
AN: B11B-0143    [Abstracts]
TI: Tropical Forest Protection, Uncertainty, and the Environmental Integrity of Carbon Mitigation Policies
AU: * Suzi, K
EM: suzi.kerr@motu.org.nz
AF: Motu Economic and Public Policy Research, P.O. Box 24390, Wellington, NZ 12345 New Zealand
AU: Hendy, J
EM: jo.hendy@motu.org.nz
AF: Motu Economic and Public Policy Research, P.O. Box 24390, Wellington, NZ 12345 New Zealand
AU: Liu, S
EM: sliu@edcmail.cr.usgs.gov
AF: USGS EROS Data Center, Science Department, Sioux Fall, SD 57198 United States
AU: Pfaff, A
EM: ap196@columbia.edu
AF: Columbia University, 2910 Broadway Hogan Hall 104, New York, NY 10025 United States
AB: Tropical forests are estimated to release approximately 1.7 PgC per year as a result of deforestation. Avoiding tropical deforestation could potentially play a significant role over the next 50 years if not longer. Many policy makers and negotiators are skeptical of our ability to reduce deforestation effectively. They fear that if credits for avoided deforestation are allowed to replace fossil fuel emission reductions for compliance with Kyoto, the environment will suffer because the credits will not reflect truly additional carbon storage. This paper considers the nature of the uncertainties involved in estimating carbon stocks and predicting deforestation. We build an empirically based, stochastic, model that combines data from field ecology, GIS data from satellite imagery, economic analysis and ecological process modeling to simulate the effects of these uncertainties on the environmental integrity of credits for avoided deforestation. We find that land use change, and hence additionality of carbon is extremely hard to predict accurately and errors in the numbers of credits given for avoiding deforestation are likely to be very large. We also find that errors in estimation of carbon storage could be large and could have significant impacts. We find that in Costa Rica, nearly 42 percent of all the loss of environmental integrity that would arise from poor carbon estimates arises in one life zone, Tropical Wet. This suggests that research effort might be focused in this life zone.
DE: 9360 South America
DE: 6329 Project evaluation
DE: 6334 Regional planning
DE: 0400 Biogeosciences
SC: Biogeosciences [B]
MN: 2004 AGU Fall Meeting