Key challenges and approaches to addressing barriers in forest carbon offset projects

Forest carbon offset(FCO)projects play an increasingly important role in mitigating climate change through market mechanisms in both compliance and voluntary markets.However,there are challenges and barriers to developing an FCO project,such as carbon leakage and cost-eff ectiveness.There have been few attempts to summarize and synthesize all types and aspects of existing challenges and possible solutions for FCO projects.This paper systematically reviews and discusses the current challenges involved in developing FCO projects,and then draws on the experience and lessons of existing projects to show how those challenges were addressed in world-leading voluntary carbon standards,namely the Verifi ed Carbon Standard,the American Carbon Registry,the Climate Action Reserve,and Plan Vivo.These voluntary markets have rich experience in FCO projects and are responsible for a signifi cant share of the market.From the 53 publications used in this analysis,three broad thematic categories of challenges emerged.These were related to methodology,socio-economic implications,and implementation.Methodological challenges,particularly additionality,permanence,and leakage,were the focus of 46%of the selected research papers,while socio-economic challenges,including transaction,social,and opportunity costs,were addressed by 35%.The remaining 19%of the research articles focused on implementational challenges related to monitoring,reporting,and verifi cation.Major voluntary standards adequately addressed most of the methodological and implementational barriers by adopting various approaches.However,the standards did not adequately address socio-economic issues,despite these being the second most frequently discussed theme in the papers analyzed.More research is clearly needed on the socio-economic challenges involved in the development of FCO projects.For the development of high-quality forestry carbon off set projects,there are many challenges and no simple,universal recipe for addressing them.However,it is crucial to build upon the current science and move forward with carbon projects which ensure eff ective,long-term carbon sinks and maximize benefi ts for biodiversity and people;this is particularly important with a growing public and private interest in this fi eld.

Alleviating forest degradation in the Lancang-Mekong Region requires closing management—measurement gaps

Deforestation and forest degradation are having profound negative impacts on social-ecological systems in the emerging economies across the tropics.Consequently,interest in restoring and rehabilitating degraded forests has been growing.This paper explores current issues related to addressing forest degradation in the Lancang-Mekong Region(LMR)of Southeast Asia through a review of the use of criteria and indicators for forest degradation and rehabilitation.Forest degradation must be understood in the context of its underlying drivers,which are numerous and complex.Understanding these underlying drivers of degradation requires diagnosing the entwined political,social,economic,and environmental systems that aff ect forests.Landscapes are the relevant scales to diagnose and intervene for improved forests.Interventions to restore or rehabilitate forests should be process-driven,focused on the underlying social,ecological and political processes that degrade landscapes.Interventions should also include negotiation among all actors infl uencing and competing for natural resource claims in forest landscapes.Criteria and indicators for forest landscape restoration should therefore help to improve the governance of forest landscapes.Criteria and indicators provide measures of the biophysical outcomes of degradation,in addition to processes,but these should be adapted to changing contexts and emerging challenges,and should rectify any pre-existing fl awed change-logic.Restoration activities should synthesize,integrate,and build upon the rich history of pre-existing restoration guidelines,but should be adaptable in order to be applied eff ectively in the contexts of local landscapes.This project is facilitating a dialogue around the use of criteria and indicators to help solve the degradation challenge in the LMR.We will trial the use of the criteria and indicators generated through this research in the LMR to learn what works and what doesn’t.This will provide an opportunity to build consensus around the ways in which restoration investments made by governments,civil society,and the private sector can infl uence sustainability.