Forest conservation through voluntary carbon offsetting interventions
Ongoing deforestation in the tropics is destabilising planetary carbon cycles, impacting biodiversity and affecting societies the world over. Multiple strategies have been put in place to reduce threats to tropical forests through integrated conservation and sustainable development projects. Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation (REDD+) refers to a diversity of mechanisms to help conserve and restore tropical forests, involving local, subnational or national initiatives to support on-the-ground sustainable management and conservation. REDD+ represents a move to support conservation by rewarding forest owners and users to reduce emissions and enhance forest-based carbon stocks, through bundles of interventions including conditional and non-conditional livelihood enhancement activities together with enabling measures and policies. REDD+ has generated debate among policy and academic circles around its lack of (or negative) impacts on social and environmental outcomes. A decade of research on REDD+ has yielded insights about its performance on multiple fronts, particularly on the social impacts, yet little is still known about its effectiveness on preventing land-cover changes and associated carbon emissions. This thesis addresses the question of whether REDD+ projects have helped to prevent deforestation. I approached the problem by producing three pieces of research that range from the applied evaluation of REDD+ to interrogating methodological approaches used to evaluate the impact of conservation interventions, using a representative sample of REDD+ projects across multiple countries operating within the voluntary carbon market. The research provides evidence of the impact of local-based REDD+ interventions in reducing deforestation while examining some of the challenges involved in using quasi- experimental methods to evaluate forest-based interventions. Chapter 2 presents one of the first global assessments of the impact of REDD+ in reducing deforestation using a standard quasi-experimental approach. I found reductions in forest loss due to REDD+, particularly in areas of higher threats of deforestation. Chapter 3 provides a comparison of matching approaches using state-of-the-art robust evaluation metrics, I found consistent average reductions in deforestation due to REDD+ across multiple matched models, however alterations in matching parameters led to considerable variation of baseline levels in some projects, thus impacting estimates of treatment effect. Chapter 4 extends the analyses of REDD+ by measuring local leakage effects and the potential implication on carbon stocks. I found higher concentration of biomass in REDD+ and leakage belts compared to controls and evidence of positive and negative leakage effects within the vicinity of interventions. The study shows that despite the multiple hurdles to delivering REDD+ carbon and non-carbon benefits, there is promising evidence that these interventions can help to reduce deforestation. As the current Cop27 in Egypt takes place and actions to scale up commitments made in the Glasgow Leaders’ Declaration on Forests and Land Use are discussed, this thesis emphasise the role of forest-based interventions as natural climate solutions and highlights some of the challenges that need to be tackled to ensure its successful implementation.
Carbon, Forest conservation, Impact evaluation, REDD+
Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations